


When Your Soul Embarks

by bluenebulae



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence - The Long Night, Canon-compliant Death, F/M, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Ramsay is His Own Warning, Underworld
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2020-02-28 21:38:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18764749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluenebulae/pseuds/bluenebulae
Summary: Theon leaves this world with the last breath of the long night, but Sansa, not quite ready to let him go, follows him down where shadows reign as the war rages on, above and below.An Orpheus & Eurydice AU.





	1. overture

****

As she emerges from the crypts, Sansa sees that the world is on fire.

She’s never seen so much smoke, burning at her throat and clouding the air around her. By her side, Tyrion coughs; behind her, the survivors of the crypt huddle in a mass, shivering and shocked. Sansa knows they look to her for guidance now—but she can’t, not yet, not until she knows the extent of the damage. To her home and to her heart.

It’s Jon she sees first, face smeared with ash and blood but miraculously whole. The dragon queen trails him through the remnants of the gate. As they draw closer, Sansa sees the trails of tears on her pale face.

 _Arya. Bran. Brienne. Theon_.

She calls out their names as Jon crosses the ground of the courtyard, blood and snow mingling into a dirty slush at his feet. He only shakes his head. Her heart sinks.

“The Godswood.”

He takes her hand in his, grip strong, and Sansa allows herself that comfort for a moment in case it’s the last she feels for a very long time.

Their names spin through her head as they pick their way through the debris of the battle. Shards of brilliant, glittering white are scattered across the stone, glinting in the firelight. All that’s left of the Night King’s army.

Who had struck the final blow?

Sansa’s mind flits to Theon, his face taut with determination, resolute as the day he’d spirited her away from Winterfell’s walls so long ago. He’d always been so good with his bow; she’d never known his aim not to be true. The arrow slices across her imagination and shatters the night into a fine powder.

By the time the Godswood looms up in front of them, Sansa has all but convinced herself it’s true.

The scene folds in from the edges: piles of bodies, Ironborn mixed with that horrible icy residue, and in the center of the storm beneath the tree, two figures. Sansa’s heart sings until she realizes the one standing is much shorter than it should be.

“Arya,” Jon says, his voice a mix of wonder and pride, and Sansa _runs_ for her, enfolds her siblings into the circle of her arms. Jon’s body molds around hers, and she lingers in the moment as long as she can, intense relief cascading through her exhausted body.

But there’s one thing missing still, and his absence is enough to return the terror tenfold.

“Bran,” she says as she pulls away, “where is Theon?”

It has been years since she’s seen any real expression in her brother’s face, but she swears she glimpses sorrow there in the recesses now. Bran doesn’t speak, just gestures behind them, just beyond the edge of the puddle of light thrown by the torches.

Theon’s back is turned to them. At first, Sansa recklessly hopes that he’s only injured, fainted from exhaustion maybe, because it is _wrong_ to see his sandy curls spilling across the bloody ground and his body so still. It’s even more wrong to see the dull, dark end of the stake protruding from the leather of his breastplate, and when Sansa realizes what it is, sour bile rises in her throat.

She swallows it down and falls to her knees beside Theon.

His eyes are open, staring up at her, familiar and eerily blank. Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth. Sansa pulls his head into her lap, pushes her fingers beneath his tangled hair to his neck to find the pulse that _must_ be there, because this is _Theon_ , who had survived months of agony under Ramsay’s hand, who had been reborn from salt and came back to fight for her after all of his pain. This isn’t where he ends, not here in this wood.

She doesn’t realize she is crying until Arya kneels beside her and nestles into Sansa’s side.

“If it wasn’t for him, we’d all be dead,” she says, her tone hoarse. “He was brave.”

“This isn’t right.”

Sansa’s voice comes out thin, watery, not imbued with the confidence she has in this simple fact. She sees Jon and Arya share a look, sadness mixed with worry, but she knows this to be true.

Sansa has seen death enough. Every time someone that she loves dies—her father, her mother, her brothers, Margaery—it stabs her in the gut, fills her mind with a whirl of white noise that never goes away, only gently fades with time. But she has never once felt this conviction in the wrongness of it all.

Someone is gently repeating her name, but she doesn’t look up from Theon’s blank gaze. Maybe she has been through too much grief, and this is her mind’s way of protecting her from this last, devastating blow. Maybe she’s gone as raving mad as the old Targaryen king. But she can swear, somewhere in the murky depths of his ocean storm eyes, she can feel his message:

 _Come find me_.

-

She doesn’t let them burn his body with the rest. The pyres rage on through the evening, sustained by the sheer brunt of the loss that settles over Winterfell like a fur cloak. They’d gathered as many bodies as they could, Dothraki and Ironborn and Unsullied and good, loyal Northerners, and watched them dissipate into smoke, reaching for the sky. But Sansa had hovered protectively by Theon’s cold body as Jon and a dazed Tormund had directed what’s left of the dragon queen’s army to gather the corpses. She hadn’t allowed anyone else to touch him. When they were alone again, she pushed her fingertips over his eyelids until the storm blue was gone, but still his voice rung in her head as clearly as if he’d stood beside her beneath the red embrace of the weirwood tree. _Come find me, come find me._

“Where?” she whispered, packing handfuls of snow around the jagged hole in his stomach so that she doesn’t have to look at it, this final suffering upon an already-broken body. Theon offers no answer.

But even without one, Sansa knows.

Again, as she watches the pyres smolder from the castle wall, the smoke fills her lungs thick enough to choke her. She wonders if the scent will ever leave the air, or if the North will forever be tainted by death. They’d lost too many to count, the remains of the great Targaryen force now sheltered in the courtyard below, mourning their losses and thanking their gods.

Tomorrow, she knows, these lucky dregs will gather in the great hall, toast to their victory, and turn their blades and minds to King’s Landing. Sansa will not be among them—she has had enough of the dreadful place, and of the dreadful queen, for a lifetime—but Jon will seek her counsel and the North will seek her guidance. She would do well to rest.

And yet, even as Sansa lies in her bed and forces her eyes to close, sleep eludes her.

He can’t be gone from the world, not just like that. Every time that death enters her life, Sansa is struck again by the duality of it, that someone could be there with her one night and never again the next. The finality is too heavy, too immutable for her, someone who had found a way to circumvent every horrible trap life has thrown at her except for this last burden.

But it isn’t always final, is it? she thinks.

Jon had died, and yet not hours earlier he’d stood beside her in the Godswood. Beric Dondarrion had died six deaths for Arya before his final rest. The surge of bodies rising gruesomely from the stone tombs—

No. Sansa won’t see Theon’s face lit with that eerie blue, not like that.

She only wants to see him smile again. It has been so very long.

-

She trails Sam through the halls the next morning, waiting until she sees him enter her father’s old study alone. Had the Red Woman not disappeared with the wind, the task may have been much simpler, but Sansa had never paid much attention to her own gods as of late, much less those of the rest of the world. Lacking a real Maester, her brother’s old friend is her best chance at any discovery.

He startles when she shuts the door behind her and stutters out her name. “What are you doing here, milady?”

“I need to ask you a question,” Sansa says, sliding into a chair across the desk from him, “and I need it not to leave this chamber.”

“I can’t—”

“Sam,” she says, calling up that sweet, wheedling voice that had been as natural to her as breath in her younger age, “only for a little while. Until I’m ready to discuss my plans. I can trust you, right?”

Sam relaxes a bit, leaning toward her and steepling his fingers. “What is it that you want to know?”

“What do you know of what comes after death?”

Sansa watches his face flit through different emotions, shock and confusion and anxiety, before finally settling on a kind of sad realization. “Oh, Sansa,” he sighs. “I’m so sorry, I know that losing Th—”

“Please just tell me. I want to know.”

Sam pauses, seeming to search her face for reassurance, and Sansa tries to reassemble her expression into one of exhausted, innocent sorrow. “Please,” she repeats.

“Alright.” Sam clears his throat, suddenly unable to hold her gaze. “There isn’t much written about it, and it differs based on which gods you follow. The Faith of the Seven dictates a division between good and evil, judged by the Mother on where the soul goes. Adherents of the Drowned God believe they’ll join their forebearers in an eternal feast in a hall sunken deep beneath the waves.” He raises an eyebrow at Sansa as if he expects her to take special notice of this, but she hasn’t heard what she needs to just yet.

“And the Old Gods?”

“Even less is known about them. I read, once, of a sprawling plain where those with unfinished business in this life still wander, calling out their woes to the living.”

He rambles on about ancient tomes in the Citadel and the origins of the White Walkers, but Sansa’s thoughts have tripped on ‘calling out.’ “Tell me more about that,” she says eagerly—a bit too eagerly, she realizes as Sam frowns at her. “The great plain of wandering souls. Do those above hear the calls? Has anyone ever tried to find it?”

“There was something about weirwood trees as gates, but they’re just stories, Sansa—”

“Thank you, Sam.” She stands, even offering him a small curtsey as he stares, dumbfounded. “You have given me much peace of mind. And remember—”

She turns as she nears the doorway, hardening her voice into the regal, commanding tone of the Lady of Winterfell.

“Word of this talk does not leave this room.”

-

The texts in Winterfell’s own library on the old gods and life after life are primitive and woefully few, but Sansa tears through them regardless, combing the pages for any mention of a field, a ghost, a voice. She finds very little, much of it in a language she can’t even read. If it weren’t for the agony of being alone with her grief once again she would have given up much more quickly, but each time she shuts the cover on a dusty tome, his eyes stare up at her from the cover—the eyes of a mischievous boy once, then a broken wretch the next, and a determined man the next, soft and strong and begging for absolution. Sansa has to turn her attention back to the page so that his beguiling gaze doesn’t plunge her back into the depths of darkness she’d felt in the Godswood.

Maybe it’s the only way she can process his absence, but it still is fruitful.

The paper she holds is not a book, but a sheaf loosely bound in black ribbon, the edges crumbling away beneath her feather-light touch. Sansa sucks in a gasp when she sees the illustration.

A young man stands before a weirwood, crudely rendered in fading ink, a misshapen mass that may be some sort of instrument strapped to his back. His palms are pressed to the eyes of the tree’s face. Around the edges curl strange words, tangled with thorns and vines and bones.

It isn’t much but a drawing, a rudimentary one at that, but the indistinguishable whispers echoing through Sansa’s head sharpen briefly.

She flips aside the first page, suddenly desperate, but is startled by the clearing of a throat.

The dragon queen stands before her, cloaked in grey and blood red, her gaze level but her lips twisted into a sympathetic frown.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Daenerys says softly. “I only came here to think.”

Sansa brushes the ancient parchment to the side, hoping she hadn’t caught a glimpse of what was on them, but she doesn’t seem to be looking at Sansa so much as _through_ her, her cold eyes somewhere far away.

“Your Greyjoy lord,” she continues, hesitant.

“He’s not my lord.”

Sansa says it quickly, a tad too defiantly, and Daenerys looks taken aback. “Of course not. I shouldn’t have assumed. My apologies.”

There are barbs at the tip of Sansa’s tongue, ready to slip off at a moment’s notice, but something in the set of Daenerys’s face stops her. She’d noticed before, during their few brief conversations, what an expressive face it was that she had; and now the expression Sansa finds there is haunted. It echoes the lines she’d seen etched in her own brow in the mirror that morning. Her own grief.

“Ser Jorah,” Sansa murmurs.

Daenerys nods, swallowing. “Seven years I’ve known him, and he saved me time and time again. I never had the chance to thank him properly.”

Sansa’s mind turns to her last night with Theon, when there had been no thanks necessary among all the words that they’d left unsaid in their companionable silence and light chatter. Theon had asked her, as they settled down in the chill of Winterfell’s night among her people, if for just one night they could forget the ghosts of pain that haunted their old home—just be Sansa and Theon once again, if it was possible. She’d agreed, of course, loathe to deny him anything he wanted, warmed by the glint of happiness in his eyes she hadn’t seen since they were young.

The idea comes to her then that if it weren’t for the woman in front of her, Theon may be here right now. Sansa can’t know for sure, but she knows that Daenerys’s arrival heralded destruction upon her family and her home. And yet that sorrow in her face at Ser Jorah’s name. This is someone who understands, she thinks.

“There were so many things I should have said to him,” Daenerys continues. “I’m sure you feel the same.”

“I do.”

Things Sansa wishes she could have said, felt, done. Ways she might have protected him like he protected her. Her hand twitches toward the stack of papers, desperate to return to them, but Daenerys is drawing closer, her steps echoing across the stone. Sansa realizes, with a start, that there are tears gathering in her eyes.

“Jorah returned for me the same way that Theon did for you.”

“They loved us,” Sansa says softly.

One side of Daenerys’s mouth quirks into the sad shadow of a smile. “The stupid things that men do for love.”

“Indeed.”

A miraculous thing happens then, a flower blooming from the cold cracks of winter. Sansa returns Daenerys’s smile, allowing herself to fall into this solitary grief that the dragon queen understands better than anyone.

Daenerys leaves soon after wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, and Sansa throws herself back into her papers with a burning heart.

-

They depart the next morning: Daenerys and Jon, Arya and the Hound, Tyrion and Tormund and even Ghost, scattering like leaves in the wind. Sansa yearns to scatter with them, cling to something stable in a world that has been turbulent for too long, but she knows that it will be easier this way, with the ruins of Winterfell silent as snow. There’s barely anyone left to question her.

No one, that is, except the one person she’ll need.

She knocks at her brother’s door and waits for a long moment before pushing it open. Bran is seated before the window, staring out at the slate-grey sky. She clears her throat, though she knows that he’s heard her.

“Hello, Sansa,” he says without turning.

Sansa crosses the floor to kneel next to him, her skirts pooling around her. “I brought you lunch,” she says gently. “Soup and bread, and ale for strength.”

Bran takes the bowl in his lap, but doesn’t lift it to his lips. His eyes finally land on hers.

“You’re planning something.”

Sansa nods. “Can you see it?”

“Only you touching the weirwood tree, and then nothing but smoke.”

“That’s a bit ominous.”

“Where are you going, Sansa?” Bran asks.

Sansa sighs. “I need to get him back.”

“He died a good death. A brave death.”

An irrational wave of anger rolls through her at her brother’s words. Who is he to say whether Theon’s death was just? Bran knew him, but not the way Sansa did. Not the way Sansa knows that he never could have deserved the moment that spilled his blood across the snow of the Godswood. Not after so much pain.

Bran must see this, though, as he watches her, because the stone set of his brow softens. “You’re determined,” he says, not unkindly.

“Very much so.”

“I don’t know what you’re planning, Sansa, but you’ll have to be careful. When I interfered with the powers of the Children of the Forest, it had dire consequences.”

He grimaces, the most expression she’s seen on his face in years.

“I’ll be as careful as I can,” Sansa promises, and means it. “Do you know anything about what comes after? Where he might be?”

“My vision stops with the weirwoods, and the weirwoods can only grow in the world of the living.”

It’s what she’d assumed, but it still stings in her chest. Dark, smoky fear rises up inside her, but now is not the time for her to be hesitant. Theon wasn’t, not when he took her hand and leapt from the wall.

“Whatever it is, though, it’s sure to be in turmoil,” Bran continues, his voice dropping. “The death on both sides of this battle will have upset the balance.”

Sansa leans over and kisses her brother’s forehead. His skin is icy, but she feels him shift. “I’ll be careful.”

“I suppose I can’t stop you,” he says as she pulls away.

She tries to offer him a smile, but she’s sure the expression comes out sadder than she’d hoped.

“No, Bran. You can’t.”

-

The next morning, under the cover of darkness just before dawn, Sansa sneaks out to the weirwood tree.

It begins to snow as she walks, the first snowfall since the battle with the dead. She’s reminded, suddenly, of her childhood, and then for agonizing moments of walking up this path dressed in white on Theon’s arm.

The snow is a comfort, though. It softens her footsteps, dulls the bloodstains to rosy pink and then to nothing at all. Sansa had packed nothing for a journey, brought nothing with her except Arya’s dagger, tucked into the belt of her dress alongside her little silver needle. The only consideration she’d made to the potential dangers of whatever lies on the other side was to bring a cloak, quilted and blue and familiar, and she draws the hood over her head now as she nears the copse.

When she enters, she sees his body has not moved. A fine coat of snow dusts his features now, his hair standing out against the paleness of his face, the blue of his lips. He looks as he did when he dragged her through the forest; just as cold, just as troubled.

Maybe, in that moment, had Sansa seen the peace on his face he deserves in the life after this, she would have turned away right then and told Bran it was all a mistake. She may have set Theon out to sea with his Drowned God to feast in glory. But all she sees on his face is pain—a furrowed brow, a trickle of blood—and she knows she will never be able to live with herself if she doesn’t at least try to ensure his pain has been eased.

He doesn’t deserve to end here, in agony, so far from the sea.

Sansa brushes past him as she walks to the weirwood. The sun is just beginning to rise, filtering through the leaves, mingling with the snow, highlighting the knobs and whorls of the pale old tree’s face. Everything else, everything besides the sun and the snow, is still.

As she pulls off her gloves and tucks them beneath her cloak, as she presses her palms to the eyes of the weirwood tree, Sansa suddenly feels incredibly foolish. What reason has she for ever thinking this might work? Only a whisper and an old writing? She’s not the Red Woman, and besides, Jon had seen nothing on the other side, because nothing is all there is. Theon is gone.

She turns her head to look at him, say her apologies and let him know she tried, but just as Sansa’s eyes land on his face she feels as if she is falling into a neverending darkness from which she may never emerge.

And then, warmth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as you all can see, i have moved from the 'denial' stage of grief over theon dying to the 'bargaining' stage. this is pure, pure wish fulfillment, and it's taking a hard right from canon, but i hope you'll all enjoy it anyway <3


	2. descent

At first, when Sansa opens her eyes, she thinks it hasn’t worked.

The same pale, lifeless face stares back at her from the trunk of the weirwood, blind to her distress. Sansa curls her hands into fists, beats them against the twisted mouth, hot tears already forming in her eyes.

But when she turns her head to the side to look at Theon’s body, to admit her defeat to him and to herself, he has disappeared.

Sansa blinks.

It’s then that the other subtle differences in her surroundings begin to make themselves clear: the dimness muting the red leaves of the weirwood, the stale quality to the air, as if the entire Godswood is a long-sealed dusty chamber that has just been opened again. The dusting of snow remains on the ground, but none falls from the sky. Sansa glances up and realizes it’s because there seems to be no sky at all.

The glimpses she catches through the cover of leaves are all a dull, desolate black. There are no stars, not even the slimmest hint of a moon; it’s as if Sansa and the Godswood stand inside a huge, invisible dome. A sept, maybe, or a vaulted crypt. She shudders, despite the unnatural warmth of the air.

Sansa turns slowly, taking stock of the rest of the Godswood. Whatever light illuminates the place in such a muted way is not evident to her. It had always seemed to her that shadows existed in the places that light could not reach, but here, the visible spots of the scene eke out an existence from the shadows instead. She cannot see anything beyond the circle of trunks rimming the little clearing, and before her, the pool, always so tranquil at home, is a glassy black void that makes her skin prickle. Sansa doesn’t linger near it a moment longer than she must.

She takes careful stock of her own body. However she had come to be in this strange not-Godswood, it hadn’t harmed her; in fact, she’d felt nothing at all. Her cloak is still intact, the hood secure over her hair, and when she slips a hand beneath it to her waist, she’s met with the twin reassurances of cool metal in Arya’s dagger and her chained spindle. It isn’t much, but it steels Sansa’s nerves to know she can protect herself, should it come to that.

That is, if daggers can do damage against shadows.

Her first tentative step from the tree finds her feet met with solid ground. The snow doesn’t crunch underfoot, but rather muffles her movements. There is no breeze, Sansa notices; whereas in her Winterfell, the leaves had rustled above her in the cold wind, the air here is as still as death.

“Hello?” she calls softly into the darkness beyond the trees.

Sansa hadn’t truly expected an answer. What she had anticipated less, however, is the way the darkness seems to absorb her voice as soon as it’s left her lips, and the way that it makes cold fingers of fear crawl up her neck.

Fighting it down with a desperate gasp, Sansa steps further from the Godswood. There is no indication of a direction she should take; Theon’s voice is gone from her mind as suddenly as his body is gone from the snow. But Sansa knows the Godswood—her Godswood, at least—and what stands around it, and she longs to cling to something familiar in this odd, dead land.

As soon as she passes from the clearing in the wood onto the path that should have led back to her home, Sansa feels the atmosphere shift. The snow beneath her disappears, leaving a clear boundary of white behind her; the air grows thicker, not with humidity, but with a nameless tension. Sansa stills.

And then she realizes it’s not so silent after all.

The whispers are, at first, indistinguishable, a quiet blanket of sound like summer insects outside her window in King’s Landing. This is not the low hum of insects, though—it’s human voices, Sansa realizes with a jolt. Voices that are eerily familiar.

She takes two steps, her right hand dropping to the dagger at her hip. The whispers grow louder, to a bare murmur. With her next step forward, they continue to grow, and Sansa moves faster, swallowing down revulsion.

And then, just as they grow into a desperate, muttering crescendo, they snap into focus.

“Cat.”

It’s her father’s voice, deep and rough and _alive_ , and Sansa feels the breath pour from her lungs.

“Father!” she cries, reaching out, but her hands are met with darkness.

“Ned, are you sure this is a good idea?”

Her mother now, echoing through the dark tunnel formed by the leaves. She sounds tired—but young, still, younger than when Sansa had last heard her at their parting so long ago.

“I don’t like it, either,” her father’s voice sighs. “But I trust Robert to protect her. I’ll be right there with her…”

A new voice usurps theirs, her mother and father fading away, and Sansa stumbles forward, grasping blindly for them. They’re gone, though, or more likely were never there at all. The darkness hums around her with pent-up energy, and yet everything is unbearably still. Sansa hitches up her cloak and begins to stumble quicker. The voices wash over her now: Jon, Arya, Bran, even Robb’s deep tenor and Rickon’s high, childish drawl, rushing through her ears and straight to her heart. The words swirl together— _take the Black, White Walkers, don’t go south_. Phrases familiar to her and words completely unknown, filling up her head. Theon’s joins in, tentative and soft as he says her name, and Sansa’s heart thrills even though it doesn’t sound quite right.

And then another memory-voice rises over his:

“Who comes to claim her?”

“Ramsay, of house Bolton.”

Sansa’s mind goes blank.

Then her feet are moving of their own accord as bile rises in her throat, filling her mouth with the sour taste of fear. She screams, rending the quiet murmurs, screams until Ramsay’s voice is gone from her head. The shadows have turned menacing—almost as if they’re reaching out for her with spindly fingers. Sansa pulls her cloak around her like armor and forces away the thoughts of hot, meaty hands and stale breath on her neck.

She runs so blindly she doesn’t notice the wall until it’s looming up in front of her.

Sansa’s feet drag to a halt. She throws her hands out before her, palms biting into the rough stone hard enough that she feels the skin tear. She gasps once, twice, the sound of her breath filling her ears, waiting to see if anything else does, as well.

It’s as silent as the crypts now.

Slowly, Sansa straightens. She realizes, with a dull kind of confusion, that she is shaking. Her mouth tastes of bile and blood, her tongue aching from where she must have bitten it. She sinks back against the wall as her knees go weak.

He couldn’t be here.

Sansa repeats it to herself in her head, and when it doesn’t stop the trembling of her shoulders, she begins to say it out loud as well: “He isn’t here. He isn’t here.”

Ramsay _couldn’t_ be here. Wherever Theon has ended up, it can’t be somewhere that Ramsay could ever hurt him in again, not after what Theon has been through, what he has done. It wouldn’t simply be unjust—it would be cruel.

Sansa had heard him in the Godswood as well, but it hadn’t truly been _him._ His voice had been too quiet, too timid. It was the voice of that husk Ramsay had made him into, softened again by the ghostliness of it.

She dares a look back over her shoulder, into the path of arching branches, but all that she finds is that same blank darkness. Whatever cruel ghosts sought her out have retreated back to wherever they came from.

And in front of her, now, is something steady and familiar beneath her hands. The wall of Winterfell’s inner courtyard, the same wall she’d passed a hundred times a day in her childhood. As Sansa digs her fingertips deeper into the rough stone, she feels the trembling in her arms finally begin to cease.

Her home, darker and emptier than the real thing, but a home nonetheless.

 _Is this what the whole of this un-world is like_? she wonders. A strange, dark reflection of above? There’s something deeply unsettling about it, like reading familiar words out of order—and yet, if nothing else, Sansa _knows_ Winterfell. It is hers in a world of chaos; she knows the comfort it can provide, and the terror. If Theon is within these walls, she will find him.

Sansa hesitates only slightly before placing her foot on the first step of the stairs. The trembling from the Godswood has ceased, but the vestiges of that fear still linger in her, spurred by the blank darkness above her. She realizes, then, what had been different about the wall beneath her hand. There had been no lichen, none of the scrubby, hardy green foliage that crept between the stone’s cracks even in the coldest depths of winter at her Winterfell. There had been no trace of anything living, not even the smallest of plants.

Sansa swallows down another wave of fear and ascends the steps.

-

The halls of Winterfell are as empty and dark as the outside had been. Sconces line the walls, wood sits in the hearths, but none of the flames are alight. Soft grey light seeps through the windows, that same, unsourceable glow that lit the edges of the Godswood, but it doesn’t penetrate the corners of the long galleries, leaving familiar features cloaked in shadow.

The Godswood had been strange enough, still as it was, but Sansa thinks this might be worse. The echo of her own boots on the stone as she paces the corridors will be enough to make her go mad if she doesn’t hear another sound soon. She’d thought that being here, inside her home, would bring her comfort, but the shadows and silence are disconcerting enough to make her feel like an intruder within the very walls of the place she calls herself the Lady of.

When she sees firelight at the end of the hall, dim and flickering, the warmth of home crashes over her all at once. Sansa flings aside thoughts of the lurking shadows and rushes toward it. It emanates from a doorway she recognizes as leading to one of the cozier sitting rooms in her parents’ chambers, a place where she used to sit with her mother and her Septa and recite her lessons during the endless, interminable days of autumn before the long winter. She hasn’t been in this wing of the castle in her own Winterfell since her childhood, loathe to disturb the peaceful memories of her parents before the fire and blood, but now the allure is as irresistible as shelter in a storm of snow.

She walks toward the doorway as if in a trance, her boots gliding over the stone. As she nears it, she can just hear murmurs emanating from it, then bright peals of laughter, drifting up to meet her like the sun from underwater.

The door is slightly ajar, just enough for Sansa to press her eyes to and peer in.

The old hall is even cozier than she’d remembered, glowing with the rich warmth of the flames in the hearth. A woman sits before it, cradling a tiny bundle the size of a loaf of bread. Sansa’s eyes dart to her face.

She can’t stop the gasp that bubbles up and out of her, nor the way that she must clutch the doorframe for support before she falls.

It’s her mother. _Here_. Young, or at least unburdened from loss and pain, judging by her sweet smile. The bundle in her arms gurgles, and Sansa understands it’s a baby.

“Mama,” a high-pitched voice says, and grubby fists clutch at Lady Catelyn’s skirts. Now Sansa has to choke back a sob, because Bran is _standing,_ hauling himself up on legs still rounded with baby fat. He, too, is smiling with the uncomplicated bliss of peace. She had forgotten entirely how happy Bran used to look, his birdlike laugh and his love of exploring, before whatever mystic force had taken root in his mind and made him into the unfeeling shell of the raven. Sansa longs to burst in, pull him to her chest, and protect him from all the horrors she knows life will rain down upon him.

But she can’t, of course, because now she sees how full the room is—bursting, in fact, with faces from her dreams, each one unscarred by the personal anguish the war had brought upon them. His back is turned to her, but Sansa can immediately distinguish her father’s form, his shoulders unbent without the weight of the Hand’s duties upon them. A pale face peeps around his shoulder, haloed with dark curls, serious even as a young teenager. In a corner beside the great drafty windows, two boys bow their heads together, deep in conversation, before bursting into exuberant laughter. Sansa cannot remember the last time she heard either her brother or Theon sound so free. They were always happiest when they were together.

Arya skids across the floor, a mischievous gleam in her eyes, and Sansa chokes on a breath when a flash of red darts from behind Lady Catelyn’s chair and howls “Mother, make her stop!”

She can’t be older than nine, her body still ramrod straight and gangly as it was before she learned to use her coltish legs and height to her advantage. Her voice is clear and high, and even in her anguish at Arya’s antics, Sansa can see it, plain as day: that innocence she’d lost forever the moment the executioner’s sword came down on her father’s neck.

Suddenly, she can’t stand to look at the vision-scene any longer, the regret and shame and longing it causes her coiling up in her stomach like some great, dark serpent. And yet she can’t stand to look away. She should rush in, chide her younger self for her naivety and all the damage she’d caused, slap her, hold her tight before the cruel world can break her—

Sansa rips herself away from the door and slams it shut behind her. A heavy stone of disappointment lodges itself in her throat.

 _Theon_. She came here to find Theon, not reminisce on ways she could or could not have altered the course of history. _Her_ Theon, not the arrogant boy or the sad shell. She needs to fight for the man what had fought for her.

The sound of clashing metal rings faintly off the stone, and Sansa whirls, flying from the shut door to the window.

Below in the courtyard, two figures circle each other, almost as if dancing. Neither wear helmets, despite their weapons, and Sansa catches sight of Robb’s dark curls and Theon’s cocky smile. Their armor gleams in the dull grey light. They’re taller now, broader in the chest, and though she knows they’d never really try to hurt each other, there’s an edge to the way they spar, especially in the tense set of Theon’s shoulders. They have something to prove, even as Robb fights Theon to a standstill and the two collapse into good-natured chuckles.

She blinks, and when her eyes open again, the scene is gone. Now horses parade through the arched gate while horns herald their presence. Sansa sees her family lined up in front of the smallfolk of Winterfell, catches another glimpse of red straining out from Catelyn’s side toward the procession with barely-restrained eagerness.

A moment too late, she understands what the horns are signaling, and she doesn’t turn away in time to miss the look of adoration her younger self lavishes on Prince Joffrey as he rides through the gate, smug and confident as if he is already the King of Westeros.

She cannot begrudge her younger self these moments of girlhood, Sansa knows. These strange visions are remnants of a life long past, and they do her no good now; if it weren’t for Joffrey and Cersei’s cruelty, she wouldn’t be the Lady of Winterfell she is today. And yet she can’t help but wonder if it might have happened in a way with less heartache and pain, all the same.

When Sansa turns back to the hall, she sees that it’s changed.

What was moments ago a long, narrow hall lined with windows to the courtyard is now wide and dark, the walls dripping with moisture. The smell of rotting things permeates the air. Sansa recognizes this place, too, but only vaguely: a passage to the kitchens beneath Winterfell’s halls, a place she’d never had much need to visit—not in her former life, at least.

The last time she had been here, she’d stood close to Theon as they herded maids and cooks out into the courtyard for a final meal before the battle. She had thrummed with nerves, but just as she felt she might shake herself out of her own skin, Theon had lain a hand on her shoulder and calmed her with a soft glance.

When she glances to her side now, she’s disappointed to find that she’s still alone, without even the ghost of sea-blue eyes to fortify her.

“Theon?” she calls as she paces the passage. Out of everywhere in Winterfell, she doesn’t think he’d be hidden away here, but she also has no idea what the laws of this version of her home are, untethered from everything she thought she knew about the way halls and walls and doors work. As if to prove her point, she watches the fire in the kitchen’s great hearth blaze to life as she passes, then fade out just as quickly.

The sound of giggles and moans ring out from a door across from her, and Sansa blushes, quickening her footsteps. There are some secrets she wants Winterfell to keep to itself.

Clanging pots become screaming children; the curses of maids become the barks of wolves. Each sound seems specifically chosen to either tempt or repulse Sansa out of the vast array of history the shadow-castle could have chosen from. She walks quickly, but warily, anxious for the moment the stone around her shifts once again into another forgotten corner. It isn’t until she hears her own young voice cry ‘Lady’ that Sansa turns away from the main passage and to a small alcove, desperate to catch a glimpse of the companion she’d lost so long ago.

Lady isn’t there, though, and neither is she. When Sansa turns back, the passage has changed again.

Gone are the clanging pots and mindless chatter and the smell of baking bread. The space before her is long, narrow, and windowless. A cold wind rushes past her like a warning. The silence falls heavy on Sansa’s ears.

This, too, is a place she recognizes only vaguely, but the prickle of unease running beneath her skin has become hot and demanding. Sansa wishes she hadn’t worn her leather bodice; she’d loved it in her Winterfell, armor against cold and blades and the seeking hands of men, but she feels constricted now. Her chest is tightening, her breath passing through her lips only in shallow gasps. Even if she cannot recall this place, her body does.

Sansa spins, desperate to get away from whatever is so alarming to her senses, but behind her the passageway stretches dark and featureless and without end. Before her, at least, she can see a flicker of light.

By the time she hears the crying, it’s already too late.

The sobs start faint. They could be the rush of waves or even a melody through walls, lilting and irregular. Sansa tries to tell herself that it’s one of these when she first hears it, even though she knows there are no waves for hundreds of miles around Winterfell and she’s never heard a melody as tragic as this.

When she eventually has to admit to herself that what she hears is grief, the pieces fall into place.

The draft from the height of the tower. The lack of other chambers. The haunting familiarity of those sobs—not even familiarity, but intimacy. Sansa knows them as if they’d come from her own lips.

As they had.

She breaks into a run. The sobs grow into wails, then screams, and finally shape themselves into words—“please stop, Ramsay, please”—and she shuts her eyes as she careens past the door. She doesn’t need to see what’s inside. She knows.

When she opens them again, though, the door is still in front of her, the outline glowing white-hot, the flicker of flames from behind it the only light she can see. The sobs grow louder until they’re crashing through her mind, impossibly loud, even when she draws the fabric of her hood tight around her head to muffle the horrible sound of her own self breaking, and that’s when Sansa realizes she, herself, is crying along with her tortured ghost.

For long moments, she hurtles into darkness, wrapping her arms around herself. She lets her sobs persist long after they need to so that she doesn’t have to hear those wretched sounds from her past—or, worse, his name cried out in her voice.

And then, when her mouth is gummy and her skin raw from swiping at tears, she does what she always does to calm herself from the nightmares of him that still wake her screaming in the night after all this time:

She thinks of Theon.

When she opens her eyes again, the harsh fiery glow and the cries are both gone. She stands in the dark, absent silence and fights to catch her breath.

Wherever she is now, the castle’s ghosts seem to have granted her a reprieve, and so Sansa conjures up one of her own: the sensation of Theon’s hand in her own, a bright spot of warmth against the memory of frigid water and snow. It is always that memory of his hand that Sansa returns to. In the darkest moments of her life, it had been the only thing to hold onto, and even if he isn’t here the memory of Theon’s fingers closing around her own is as good a talisman as any.

Sansa’s fingers reflexively clutch at air as if she really is holding Theon’s hand in her own. It will be more than a memory soon, she tells herself. She hopes against hope that Theon’s descent had taken a different path than her own. She can’t even begin to imagine what shape the demons Winterfell would have summoned for him would have taken.

“I’m coming,” she whispers into the dead air. Sansa can tell by now that Theon is not within the castle walls—she would have known if he was. If there are rules dictating this nightmarish place, she doesn’t understand them, but she would have heard his voice if nothing else. He would have heard her cries. He must be somewhere else, and Sansa can only hope that it’s nothing like Winterfell.

Eventually, the dark passage takes form as a tunnel, and Sansa sees a light at the end of it—not the firelight of memories, but the dove-grey glow of dead sky. By the faint illumination, she can see stone and dirt, but the tunnel is wide and unfamiliar to her. If it’s a part of Winterfell, it’s not one Sansa has ever encountered before, and she doubts there’s an inch of it she hasn’t seen by now.

When she comes within sight of the end, she stops short. There is green beyond the opening, verdant and bright even against the dull sky. It’s lusher than anything Sansa has seen before in her life—and yet the air has grown cold for the first time since she entered the un-world. Ice crystals form on the wall, lacing intricate patterns in the cracks of the bricks. Glad for her cloak and too desperate to escape the tunnel before the memories come roaring after her, Sansa huddles against the chill and forges forward.

The air grows thick around her as Sansa nears the exit; her steps seem to take twice as long, as if the place is trying to hold her there, but she sees grass and black sky and a flash of something bright and she fights for her freedom. Crossing the threshold is a gasp of new life, the air in her lungs clean and sweet.

Sansa glances back to the tunnel she’d just left. It has disappeared entirely. All she sees is pale, shimmering blue like ice.

Exactly like ice.

She understands now. It stretches out on either side of her, endless, and even though Sansa has never seen it before in her life she knows. Bran’s warning of restless White Walker spirits echoes in her head, bringing a new, urgent edge to her fear.

Sansa has arrived at the Wall, and she is not alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my estimated chapter count was wildly wrong. the story plan sprawled out from my disappointment with these last few episodes, but that's what fanfic is for, right? 
> 
> again, HUGE liberties being taken with the concept of the afterlife, lol. i haven't read the books in a looooong time so we're just going with show canon which has like nothing about them in it, and i'm a sucker for spooky castles!!


	3. peregrine

The figure cuts a bright red slash, like a wound, against the shimmering ice. Sansa’s first impulse is to run; her second is to drop her hand to her dagger. She does neither. The figure is just as still, and though Sansa can’t see their face, she has the impression that they are staring her down. Sansa forces herself to hold her gaze steady against all of her baser instincts.

It’s not a White Walker—that she is sure of. But as the figure begins slicing a path across the grass toward her, red fabric billowing in its wake, fear spikes through Sansa. If an inanimate place like Winterfell can conjure up such malicious visions, who knows what horrors the denizens of this world are capable of? Sansa is utterly out of her depth; she’d never been interested in the mysticisms that had intrigued Bran and Arya, preferring the solid truths of history and the just-real-enough tales of knights and princesses and political intrigue. She has a feeling that here, no title would ever prevent something from trying to hurt her.

As the figure nears, though, a lilting voice rings through the air, one just familiar enough to shear the edge off her fear: “Lady Sansa.”

The billowing smudge of red smoke resolves itself into a woman, crimson hair, crimson dress, milky skin. Sansa’s fists uncurl at her sides—she hadn’t realized she had been clutching them. _The Red Woman._

She has an intense, irrational desire to rush toward her and embrace her, simply for being something familiar and real that Sansa can cling to, but the urge fades as the woman comes to stand in front of Sansa. She looks just as Sansa remembers her, right down to the ruby-inlaid collar at her throat, and Sansa’s mind flashes to Ser Davos returning from the field beyond Winterfell holding it delicately with both hands as if it was poisonous. It’s a silly idea, though, she thinks, that there can only be one. If there is an entire facsimile of Winterfell below the surface of her world, of course there can be two necklaces.

And yet there is something else not quite right about Melisandre of Asshai that Sansa cannot put her finger on. She studies the other woman’s face, but Melisandre’s expression is placid, giving nothing away.

“I did not expect you to arrive here so soon,” the Red Woman says. She tilts her head, her piercing gaze interrogating Sansa’s. After a moment, she arches one perfect brow. “But you did not come here in the natural way.”

It is a statement, not a question, but Sansa nods anyway.

“Such bravery,” Melisandre murmurs. “Tell me, then, why _have_ you come here, child?”

“I’m not a child,” Sansa says defiantly.

“When you’ve seen as much as I have, everyone is a child to you. You would do well to hold onto some of that innocence still.”

In another woman’s mouth, the words would have been condescending, but everything that Melisandre says takes the shape of an absolute truth, imbued with the weight of years. And yet Sansa still can’t imagine what lingering innocence she might be referring to.

“You’re here for someone,” the Red Woman continues, her gaze still eerily intense. “Another soul who left you during the Long Night.”

Sansa doesn’t say anything, but she inclines her chin, a short nod.

“The Greyjoy boy.”

Again, Sansa nods, trying not to blink into Melisandre’s stare.

“The Lord of Light makes no mistakes. If he were meant to still be there, he would be.”

“Theon doesn’t believe in the Lord of Light,” Sansa says.

“And neither do you.”

Melisandre looks away then, finally, directing her gaze out and toward the lush forest beyond the Wall. She laughs, a soft, chiming sound, but one that carries no humor or happiness in it.

“It’s hard to believe in any one of the gods we know in a place like this.”

“So you’re not…”

“No, child. I still serve my Lord. He simply takes many faces.”

“Have you…met him?”

Sansa feels foolish as she says it, but Melisandre doesn’t laugh. Her expression turns wistful.

“No.”

It’s strange to see her act so vulnerable. Sansa hadn’t known her long, but at Winterfell, she’d seemed completely otherworldly—an image Sansa suspects Melisandre had carefully cultivated. And yet now, her emotions are on display for Sansa and whoever else roams the forest to see. No need for a façade here, Sansa supposes. Not if there’s no magic to make or souls to resurrect.

“How did you bring Jon back?”

“Not the same way that you seek to bring your Greyjoy lord home.”

“He’s not—” Sansa breaks off and sighs. “How did you do it, though? What made him come back? Please. Anything will help.”

“The Lord of Light had a purpose for him. I was simply the conduit for his power.”

“But what purpose? Arya was the one who killed the Night King.”

“One that is still to be fulfilled.”

Sansa thinks of Jon marching through the gates of Winterfell with Daenerys’s cohort, face resolute, and then of Cersei caught off guard, turning in fear to face him in the throne room. She can’t help her small smile.

“You all have roles left to play,” Melisandre continues softly. “Including, I believe, Theon Greyjoy.”

The smile slides off Sansa’s face as the thoughts of Cersei and Jon drain from her mind. “How do you know? Have you seen him here?”

“This land works in mysterious ways.”

Sansa suppresses a groan, tiring of the other woman’s mysticisms.

“He will be here, though,” Melisandre says. “Beyond the wall, although it serves little of the same purpose that the wall you and I know does.”

“Why is he here?”

Beyond them, the leaves rustle despite the still air, as if to punctuate just how different the true north is here. Sansa flinches, warily eyeing the deeper recesses of the forest, where the dull grey light does not penetrate. She had never seen Castle Black; if she’s being honest, she had never wanted to. She can’t see why Theon, with far less attachment to the North than her, would end up somewhere as strange as this—although the thought of the otherworldly creatures that might lurk in the depths of the dark Iron Islands makes her thankful that’s not where he is instead.

“This is where all of us went, child. Everyone who perished during the long night, human or not.”

“But why? Why not Winterfell, or—” Sansa stops short, a new thought dawning on her. “How long do people stay here? Are there still souls from before, like…”

Like her parents, Robb, Rickon, Margaery, her Septa, Ser Rodrik—so many names that she’s overwhelmed to think of them. All of them, _any_ of them.

“This is something you will have to discover yourself.”

“How helpful,” Sansa grumbles, and then immediately feels guilty. Melisandre had been useful, and now Sansa has probably gone and wounded her pride.

Instead, the Red Woman only laughs. “Above, I had many years to cultivate my knowledge. Here, I am nearly as blind as you, Lady Stark. Maybe blinder.”

How in the world could she know less than Sansa? Sansa knows _nothing_ , except that she’s uneasy and apprehensive and she just wants to find Theon and go home. If the land beyond the Wall here is as vast as her father and Jon had said the one in her world is, it could take ages to find Theon. She wouldn’t even know where to start.

She says as much to Melisandre, unable to keep an edge of anger out of her voice. “And on foot, as well? He’s Gods-know-where, he might be suffering, and I’m—”

She stops short. Melisandre is looking behind her, a slight smirk gracing her lips.

“You will not be on foot, my lady.”

Sansa hears heavy footfalls, the wet, snuffling sound of an animal’s breath, and for a heartbeat she is paralyzed with fear at what new monster has risen from the forest. Then the memory of those sounds washes through her.

The tears are in her eyes even before she turns around.

In the dim grey light, the direwolf’s white coat shines like moonbeams. Her head is cocked slightly, her eyes inquisitive, as if she doesn’t quite recognize Sansa either. She’s far bigger than Sansa remembers, her ears nearly level with Sansa’s shoulders.

“Lady,” Sansa says quietly, as if speaking too loudly will shatter the illusion.

Lady pads forward, her gentle eyes tracking Sansa’s hand as it raises. She is _not_ an illusion. Her nose is wet in Sansa’s palm, her fur matted but soft.

Sansa falls to her knees and buries her face in Lady’s neck. The tears leak from her eyes and are caught in Lady’s fur. There is a smile on Sansa’s face, though, and a lightness in her heart than she hasn’t felt since arriving in the world below.

When she finally pulls away from Lady, her fingers still tangled in her direwolf’s fur, the Red Woman has vanished from the edge of the forest. Sansa shivers.

Lady inclines her head, her two front legs pushing forward until her neck brushes the ground. Sansa looks at her in confusion, having never seen a direwolf act in such a way before, until she remembers Melisandre’s words.

“Thank you,” she whispers to Lady, smoothing the fur behind her ear.

Then she rises and hitches up her heavy skirts to sling one leg over Lady’s shoulders. Sansa worries that she might be too heavy—she’s tall, and her dress weighs her down, nothing like Arya’s slight form—but Lady straightens up with ease, her strong shoulders rolling beneath Sansa. She turns her head back, as if to ask Sansa what to do next.

Sansa hesitates, then looks to the forest. “There.”

Then the wind is in her hair and it’s all she can do to cling to her direwolf’s neck as they fly through the afterlife.

-

The forest, once they enter it, is even darker and more silent than the world surrounding it. Some kind of moss dampens Lady’s footfalls; in the dimness, Sansa can’t tell if it’s deep green or black. Lady’s speed creates a sense of wind around them where there is none. Sansa hunkers down on her direwolf’s back, arms wrapped tight around Lady’s neck and cheek flush with soft fur, sure that she’s never moved across land so quickly in her life, or un-life as it were.

Lady doesn’t seem to know where she’s headed any better than Sansa does. It seems she’s taken Sansa’s vague direction and locked it in her mind; the pair shoot through the trees like an arrow aimed true at its target, though Sansa doesn’t yet know if the target she seeks will be there at all.

She hasn’t heard Theon’s whispers since she tumbled into the darkness. There is a dull ache in her chest at his absence. Now that Sansa is alone with her thoughts again, the threat of Winterfell’s ghosts far behind her, the ache grows insistently.

There are many aspects of her conversation with the Red Woman that had unsettled her, but above all, there is one question that lingers in her mind:

“ _Tell me, then, why_ have _you come here_?”

She had deflected it. In the moment, it’s all she could do, because there are too many facets to any response she could have given that she couldn’t sort through with the sorceress standing there, staring at her. Now, though, half-formed answers swarm through her head, tangling around other thoughts in thorny knots that she can’t take the time to pick at—not until she’s found him.

They have a life of their own, though, and won’t stay down.

If Theon is here, who else is, as well? If _Lady_ is here, a memory relegated so far back in Sansa’s list of heartrending losses that Sansa had all but forgotten her beloved pet’s form before she appeared, what other spirits of her past might she find?

What if she can only bring one of them home?

Rickon had been but a babe when Sansa had last seen him— _really_ seen him. She does not think of that moment she glimpsed him across the battlefield, fleeing Ramsay’s hate-filled face. She does _not_. His round cheeks, flushed from late-autumn chill as he toddles toward her, is what fills Sansa’s mind instead.

Were he alive now, he would have just reached thirteen years of age. He would have just begun to grow tall like his brothers, his face thinning, his curls darkening, his legs beginning to lope. He would teeter on the brink of adulthood. And instead, that opportunity had been ripped away from him.

If it came down to Theon or Rickon, how could she ever choose?

At the same time that the flood of lost names and faces fill her head, Sansa is desperately aware of the fact that her time here is limited. Above, the war rages on, and she cannot stand the thought of another face she loves appearing before her while she lingers here, chasing down an army of ghosts. Thinking of Theon, too, conjures up dread in her stomach; she knows how strong he is better than maybe anyone, and yet even iron can fracture in the cold. The idea of him in even more pain floods Sansa with sick fear, and if there is a second of it that she could spare him then it is a second too much.

Lady breaks into a clearing, and Sansa looks up. The sight of an open sky, even dead and colorless as it is, is a relief. The dark cover of leaves had begun to feel claustrophobic.

Sansa breathes deeply, taking in air that is still dry and stale, but free of that moldy, organic taste that had permeated the forest. Even the living things here seem dead—and who’s to say they aren’t? She certainly doesn’t want to investigate the knifelike branches arcing above her to find out.

Movement flashes overhead, and Sansa cranes her neck to look up, her heart suddenly juddering into her throat. Is this how it would be for every moment she spends here, always glancing over her shoulder, constantly on edge? Surely it had just been a leaf. A storm cloud, maybe, although Sansa had seen no indication of weather existing here at all.

But no, she sees it again, clearer this time, shadow on slate, darting above them and growing closer. It keeps perfect pace with Lady. Sansa curses herself for only packing two small daggers as her sole defense. She’d never learned to aim an arrow, never taken the interest in such unladylike things as Arya had in her youth, but if she had Theon’s aim here now he could have brought the menacing form to the earth in one strike. His arms encircle her, as if to point a phantom bow to the sky, and she nearly sinks back into them.

Instead, as Sansa’s right hand goes to her dagger for what feels like the thousandth time, she peers up again. As it grows larger in her vision, the dark blotch shapes itself into a great pair of wings, a lithe body. A bird, maybe a crow. Or a raven.

Would that be better or worse?

As she tugs gently at the fur of Lady’s neck to slow her pace, Sansa’s heart climbs from her throat into her mouth. She has no clue if this is the right decision. Her instincts tell her _no,_ there is something incredibly unnatural about the size of this bird and its smudgy trail of shadow, but her mind darts—irrationally, impossibly—to Bran, reaching through the veil that separates her from her family.

So she calls his name, feeling foolish and hopeful in equal measure.

Lady slows to a stop. Above them, the raven does as well, hovering in a way Sansa has never seen a bird move before. Bran’s name splits the silence that’s been surrounding her for so long that her own voice nearly hurts her ears. She and Lady could have been running for hours. Sansa has no way of telling. Without the sun or the moon above her, she feels untethered from any real sense of time.

The raven dips closer, hanging still above Sansa as if it’s as wary of her as she is of it. Or maybe as if it’s waiting.

She takes a shuddering breath. “Bran?” she calls again, her voice tremulous.

The bird seems to quiver, a sudden blurring against the grey. It flaps its wings once, twice, and then shoots off across the sky at an angle from where they’d been heading.

Sansa feels her breath catch, and she huddles down to Lady’s neck. “Go, girl,” she murmurs.

-

As the raven guides them onwards through the thickening forest, exhaustion finally begins to catch up to Sansa. She hadn’t rested or eaten or even drank a sip of water since she’d arrived, however long ago that might have been—hours or days, she can’t tell. Even so, this exhaustion doesn’t feel like any of those, but something even more pernicious: a weariness in her bones, weaving itself through her being. She hasn’t felt so downtrodden since the nights she refuses to remember in the Winterfell that was not _her_ Winterfell.

She wants to tug Lady to a halt again and shelter in the moss beneath one of the trees. It looks so soft, an invitation to rest even despite its darkness and rotting scent. But the raven flies on above her, and Lady trods on below her, and neither shows signs of stopping.

To keep herself upright, her fingers still knotted in Lady’s fur, Sansa dreams of all the places they could be leading her. If the raven is Bran, or sent by Bran, or at all connected to Bran, it knows her goal. Sansa wonders how far Bran’s sight reaches—he hadn’t been able to see _her_ here, but Theon, maybe, he could glimpse. Sansa can only hope that’s what the raven is doing. The prospect of finding Theon in the vast, dark north had seemed daunting before, but now that she’s had a taste of guidance through it, to find herself alone again would be twice as painful.

For what must be the hundredth time, Sansa strains her ears, picturing Theon’s face as vividly as possible. His murmurs are still gone from her mind, lost to her like the sunlight, but maybe, she thinks, she simply isn’t listening right. Maybe if she strains a little harder, clarifies the edges of his face in her mind…

With a horrid shock, Sansa realizes the harder she tries to imagine him, the more faded his face becomes.

It’s such a startling thought that Sansa’s fingers loosen their hold on Lady and she nearly topples to the forest floor. Her panic only makes Theon fade faster, the blue of his eyes becoming green, grey, hazel, until she can’t say what they really were anymore. He is sand between her fingers. How could she have forgotten him? He’d only been gone for a few short days—

Desperately, Sansa lunges for another memory, one sharper and smaller and refined by her calling it up a thousand times. The heat of his hand in hers even through the gloves, the heartbeat jumping wildly in his wrist.

She lets her memory of Theon blossom up from that hand, first the arm, then the shoulders, then finally his face, thin and worn and saddened and Theon. Sansa sags against Lady. It isn’t Reek she wants, but it is still _him._

And then she hears it, quiet as a whisper, but clear:

“Sansa.”

It’s _him_ , and then it all floods back in, the anger and the confusion and the comfort and the love, and Sansa could cry if she weren’t already so emotionally spent. Yes. _Yes_. They must be right.

“Lady,” she coos to her direwolf, “he’s close.”

Lady howls and moves faster.

-

The raven dives suddenly, so quickly that Sansa nearly misses it, exhausted as she is. Lady hasn’t seemed to tire, fueled by some otherworldly reserve of energy, and Sansa had faded into the lull of her rhythmic footsteps with too much ease.

When the raven plunges to the earth, Sansa sees it, but doesn’t comprehend it for long moments. When she finally does, she nearly leaps from Lady’s back, so addled by sleep that she doesn’t know what to do.

Lady, thankfully, understands better than her, because the direwolf slows to a stop beneath the place the raven had disappeared. Sansa slides from her back, legs unsteady from hours of disuse. She leans against Lady’s warmth while she waits for her head to stop spinning.

Once she regains her vision, she casts her gaze about, but the raven is gone. Sansa can only see more of the dark forest, velvety black leaves dripping from heavy branches toward her, a trunk thrice as thick as Lady before her, and barely enough grey light filters through them to see anything at all. Theon’s voice has grown louder. It pulses now, her name from his mouth beating alongside her heart.

It takes her too long to notice the cave because against all the darkness, the entrance is a void only a shade blacker than the rest of the forest. It twines into the thick, black roots of the trunk. Sansa glances about her again once she sees it, hoping against hope that this isn’t what the raven and Lady and Theon had been leading her to; the hole is as empty as can be, and although Sansa can’t see anything in its depths, simply looking at it fills her with a sense of foreboding worse than anything she’d felt in the nightlands.

Even so, the forest around her reveals nothing else out of place besides the dreadful void and Lady’s bright fur, nearly luminescent against the grey. Sansa takes one hesitant step in the cave’s direction; the dread in her stomach grows more urgent, but so does Theon’s voice.

If this is what it takes, if this is where she must go to find him—

He hadn’t hesitated when he knocked Myranda from the battlements, when he led her through a river of ice, when he stood in sight of the gods and gave his life for Bran’s. She will not hesitate now.

“Lady,” she murmurs to her direwolf, “I have to go. I don’t want you to follow me. It may be dangerous.”

Lady cocks her head as she stares up at Sansa, her luminous yellow eyes wide.

“If I don’t see you again—” Sansa chokes back the sadness that comes along with the thought—“you were the best companion I could have wished for. I’ll miss you, girl.”

The yellow eyes follow Sansa for one more moment, and then Lady lifts her great head, elongating her white throat, and emits a long, mournful howl that pierces the night. Then she stands and lopes off into the darkness. Sansa watches her fade until the white is completely gone.

Then she turns to the void. The air that the hole emits is cool, and Sansa tastes salt on her lips. It pulls her forward even as her fear grows. She can make out scant details now; the roots about the entrance are smooth, oddly shaped, and in the dark they curl into strange spirals that fill her with foreboding. It is both unnatural and ancient.

“Theon,” she says quietly into the face of the void. “I’m coming.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay with this one!! have been goin thru some maaaajor life changes recently ✨ (all good stuff!! keep an eye out for the take your fandom to work day theonsa fic now that i have a job HAHAH)
> 
> hmu at pseudonova.tumblr.com if you want to chat about theonsa/got/shows with actual good endings/life/etc 💕 and thank you, as always, for all the love in the comments and kudos sections!!!! i love the lil community this ship has so much ❤


	4. oldstones

As soon as Sansa steps into the darkness, the rest of the world drops away.

She can hear nothing, nor see nothing; her nose is filled with a dry, earthy scent. When she brings her hands out before her, they meet no resistance. At her sides, they traverse knobby swirls of wood, invisible and ancient beneath her seeking fingers.

She glances back over her shoulder and sees nothing.

The ground, at least, is blessedly smooth, and she doesn’t trip as she slowly moves forward. At first, she wonders where all the roots of the giant tree have gone until she realizes they’re _around_ her—guiding her down into the depths below the trunk, the only way forward.

Her ears may not hear a sound, but whispers fill her head regardless; his, of course, but a chorus of other voices too, no one distinguishable from the rest but all just familiar enough. She wonders if her mind will ever be silent again.

They offer some relief as well, though; the loss of Lady’s comforting breath beneath Sansa has left her empty, and at least she is not so alone for the arduous walk down into what she is sure must be the center of the other world, judging by how long it takes. She hums a melancholy melody in response. The darkness is so complete that it almost feels natural to be blind. So complete that when a dim ember of light illuminates the end of the path, it hurts Sansa’s eyes, an aberration.

She walks, and it grows. It is not firelight—it is not the right shade; it is colorless, pure. Sansa draws her cloak tighter, although she is not cold.

By most standards, the cave would still be unbearably dim, but in contrast to the former darkness, Sansa can see everything. The whorls of the roots beneath her fingers come to life, vaulting high over her head. The path widens, now the size of the widow’s walk along Winterfell’s battlements.

The sounds take longer to hear. It’s only when Sansa reaches the end of her mournful humming that she notices them: a whispering like leaves in the wind, and impossibly, the rush of water.

“Theon?” she calls, though she knows instinctively it is not him.

The whispering shifts, now coming from behind her. Sansa glances over her shoulder to see nothing but darkness. When she turns back, she stumbles, a scream burbling up in her throat.

A child stands before her, reaching just to Sansa’s chest. One half of her pale face is leathery and rough; her eyes, unlike those of the visions she’d seen in Winterfell, are colorless. And they’re focused right on Sansa.

“Who are you?” the girl chirps.

Sansa fights back the urge to glance behind her again, to make sure the child is actually talking to her and not some other phantom—but she knows already there is nothing but darkness. The girl’s head is cocked, a sweet, open expression on her half-ruined face.

“If I tell you,” Sansa says, “will you answer something for me in return?”

“I can try,” says the girl.

Sansa bends down, not quite kneeling, to look the girl in the eye. She’s a precious little thing; there’s sadness in her translucent eyes, and Sansa’s heart convulses.

“I am Sansa Stark of Winterfell.”

The girl nods, her lips quirking up in an innocent smile. “I’ve heard of you. You’re a lady, just like me.”

“What house are you lady of?”

“House Baratheon.”

“Shireen,” Sansa says aloud as her heart plummets. She’d never met the girl, but she’d overheard Ser Davos telling Jon of the horror the Red Woman had inflicted on her. Suddenly, Sansa has the desire to wrap the girl in her cloak, spirit her away from this place—but she does look as if she belongs here, monochrome and waifish, tragic as it is.

“Shireen,” repeats Sansa as she holds the girl’s gaze, “do you know where we are?”

Shireen Baratheon nods. “On the other side. Did you…?”

“No, but I’m looking for someone who did.”

The young girl nods again, looking sage beyond her years. “There have been many of them lately. So many strangers, all of them sad.”

“Are there many here? Where we are now?”

Shireen casts her blank grey eyes to the tangle of roots vaulting above their heads. “Sometimes. It’s strange here. I met a man not long ago—he said he had skin like mine once. He said that the ones who are drawn here have been touched by death before. Sometimes many times.”

 _What is dead may never die._ Theon glimmering in the depths of Reek’s eyes.

Yes, Sansa thinks, this is the place.

“Thank you, Shireen. I’m—” Sansa’s voice cracks in her throat. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. For what they did to you.”

The words are inconsequential, nowhere near enough, especially not coming from a stranger, but Shireen smiles anyway, somehow still genuine and innocent, and Sansa’s mind darts uncontrollably to Rickon again. He’d smiled the same way when he was a child, when they were all together in Winterfell. War and cruelty and death take everyone indiscriminately, Sansa knows, no matter how innocent and good they are, and yet her skin still burns with the injustice of it. She wishes she could have said something to the Red Woman when she had the chance.

Shireen looks at Sansa serenely. “That way, there’s a pool of water. We’re drawn there. It’s like a song in my head. I hope you find him, Lady Sansa.”

Sansa doesn’t remember telling the girl it was a _him_.

The direction she’d indicated glows faintly with a sickly, unnatural blue light, different from the grey she’s used to. Sansa turns to it, wondering if it’s better or worse than the pitch darkness.

“They don’t always stay, you know,” Shireen calls after her. Sansa halts. “Some people find what they’re looking for and they pass on. My father never even came here at all.”

Sansa shuts her eyes against sudden tears that threaten to encroach. “Thank you, Shireen,” she answers in a watery voice. She doesn’t look back at the girl for fear that if she does, she’ll never move forward again.

-

The unnatural blue emanates from little crystals embedded in the roots, twining between them in mysterious patterns. Sansa has never seen a White Walker, even after the long night, but the shapes remind her of ice, the color of the sparse, haunted descriptions Jon had provided her of the creatures. The idea twines into her vision until she can’t see each one as anything else but a glowing, evil eye.

It makes her walk faster, plunging ahead through the tunnel to the faint drip of water that echoes against the dirt floor. The tangle of roots overhead grows thicker all the while. Occasionally, a dangling vine will reach down and brush through Sansa’s hair, pulling her braid out strand by strand, reminding her of the weight of what rests just above her head, what would happen if the vast invisible tree decided to withdraw itself from the space around her and let the un-world return to its natural state.

That is, until the roots and the dirt become something more unforgiving. The echo of the water changes its timbre, clarifying into something sharp and hard like a hail of daggers.

Stone, underfoot and around her, in the heart of the weirwood. Sansa pauses, momentarily confused, her suspicion growing. That same unsettled feeling from the mouth of the cave is rising through her again, but this time, turning back doesn’t even cross her mind. She has come too far. His voice is still there too, less a sound and more a feeling, a second heartbeat beside her own.

And then the claustrophobic tangle breaks away into a clearing—no, more like a cave. The blue light ceases at the mouth, returning to the dove-grey that has begun to feel less deadly and more familiar. It filters across rocks, jutting out of the ground in knobbly fingers, until it collides into a pool of darkness, glossy and still.

Her gaze follows the water up, over, until she sees where it’s broken by a spot of paleness. A familiar form, even in new light, bisected by water at the waist, and her breath catches in her throat, the cave collapsing in on her.

“Theon.”

His name comes out choked. As the sound leaves her mouth, his voice drops from her head. _All_ sound drops away.

The silence stretches complete between them, even as Sansa begins to move toward him slowly, as if in a reverie.

Her breath comes again, filling up her chest in a way she hadn’t felt since the last time she felt his arms around her. Theon’s chest, too, rises and falls, she can see as she comes closer. His pale skin is littered with scars overlaid with lacerations, red and raw. She winces; she wants to be sick; she wants to hold him to her and never let anything hurt him again.

Sansa calls his name again, searching his face from a distance. His eyes are closed. He doesn’t so much as tremble at the sound of his own name, and Sansa has the horrible thought that maybe he can’t hear her at all, can’t hear anything, that it’s yet another thing that’s been taken from him—like his dignity, like his life. The dark water laps up against the sharp jut of his hipbones. He’s grown thin, like he was when he spirited her through the snowy forest. Thinner. Sansa can count his ribs.

Her footsteps pick up as she rushes for the water’s edge. This isn’t right. He’s too still. Sansa can’t see his eyes. She needs to see his eyes, to know it’s still him, that Theon is still in there, that she isn’t too late and she hasn’t lost him to this horrible place—

Her name rings out across the cavern. Theon’s lips don’t part; his eyes don’t open.

Sansa looks down. Her toes are mere inches from the edge of the water. As she watches, a tiny ripple burbles up from the edge to splash against the point of her boot. The leather sizzles, blistering nearly instantly.

“Don’t go any further,” that same voice says. It comes from behind her, somewhere over her right shoulder. Like everything in this world, it is familiar to Sansa and yet not.

Sansa is hesitant to turn. She has the horrible thought that if she takes her eyes off of Theon for even a moment, he will disappear. But her curiosity is too great, and she turns slowly, fighting the hope fluttering its wings against her ribcage that the voice belongs to who she thinks it does.

But no, her instincts hadn’t failed her. Not for something so important.

Her mother’s form takes shape out of the cave’s shadows. Her hair is redder than Sansa remembered it being, like a flame now. She’s pale as well, new lines in her skin. A jagged white slash across her neck and sadness in her eyes.

Sansa turns and _runs_ to her.

Before she feels her mother’s arms, though, the air grows thick between them. Sansa has to fight to near Lady Catelyn. It feels as if she’s walking through viscous, invisible snow, until it grows to be too much, and she can’t push any further, mere inches from her mother’s face.

“Mother,” Sansa says, her mouth dry. Catelyn gives her a sad smile, one that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

“You can come near me, Sansa. I’ve missed you.”

“I can’t,” Sansa says. She holds up a hand as if to prove it. Even standing so close to her mother strains her body, stealing the breath and strength from her.

Lady Catelyn’s expression changes, the melancholy smile dropping away into shock. “You haven’t died.”

“No, mother. I came to look for someone. To bring him home.”

Her gaze dances over Sansa’s shoulder. Sansa can only nod.

She expects anger from her mother, or at the very least disappointment. The Lady of Winterfell had never attempted to hide her disdain for the not-quite-Starks that shared their table and their lives, and Sansa knows her distaste would have sharpened into hate after Theon’s betrayal, never learning the rest of the story. Does she even know Bran is still alive?

But as Sansa opens her mouth to say so, her mother’s face softens as she looks back and forth between Theon and Sansa. “I’ve been here too long, my daughter,” she murmurs. “I’ve met everyone there is to meet. I’ve heard the stories.”

“So you know…”

“It’s a shame the Bolton bastard never made it here.” Catelyn Stark’s mouth twists into a cruel grin, a hint of the wolf within her that Sansa remembers. “I’m sure there are quite a few of us who would have liked to have _words_ with him.”

There it is again—that idea that there are many of them here, people who know Sansa, who Sansa might have loved, who Sansa thought had been lost to her forever. She feels as if she’s being torn in two; one half of her is screaming to turn back to Theon and bring him back to her, no matter what it takes, the memory of his scars unable to leave her mind. The other wants to push through the haze of thick air surrounding her mother and fall into her arms, ask her to lead Sansa to the rest of her family, and never let them go.

Lady Catelyn must see it all splay out on Sansa’s face, clear as rain. She lifts a hand to Sansa’s cheek. They cannot touch, but Sansa’s skin grows cold, and she leans into the chill, closing her eyes, imagining her mother’s soft fingers.

“I’m the only one.”

Sansa’s eyes snap open.

“Your father and your brothers—they’ve passed through,” Catelyn continues. It sounds as if her heart is breaking with every word, just as much as Sansa’s is.

“Passed through.” The words feel like ashes in her mouth.

“Your father was here for a time, until Joffrey Lannister died, and then he and King Robert found their peace, I suppose. He had no need of this place. Robb needed only to be reunited with Talisa. Rickon never even came here at all.”

Her mother’s voice cracks, but she breathes deeply, steadying herself. “And I am glad for it. This is not a place for children, Sansa, not for the weak or naïve or kindhearted. I don’t know why you’ve come here at all.”

“I had to try,” Sansa answers softly. Now she _does_ look back at Theon, motionless in that dark still water, pale and silent as the corpse she’d left behind. There is something so viscerally wrong about it that waves of cold spread throughout her, radiating from her chest and making her legs weak, as if she’d been plunged into the pool with him.

“You love him,” her mother says softly.

Does she? Sansa had thought about Theon enough times as she descended, pictured his face over and over, the cadence of his voice, the roughness of his skin. She had imagined years winding away from her down a dark, narrow path without him there, and the way her future brightened and blossomed when she envisioned him in it. She replayed their short time—never enough—in her head until it calcified there behind her eyes.

Is that what love is, in a world such as this?

Sansa had always thought, in her youth, love would be a burst of light, a stranger on a white horse, a thrilling adventure. With Theon, there is none of that—only a glow of warmth when she’s with him, the way that when he holds her, she feels as if she can finally breathe right again.

Maybe that’s what she needs, she thinks, still watching her mother but fighting the need to turn back to Theon and drag him from the water. Maybe she’s sick of adventures and monsters and running. Maybe what she deserves—what they both deserve—is something quieter. Rest, for a moment. Serenity.

Sansa spins and rushes back to the water’s edge. He’s close enough that she can see the flicker of his eyes beneath his eyelids now, and yet just too far, the deceptively still water continuing to hiss at her toes.

“How do I get him back?” she asks hoarsely.

Catelyn sighs. “I found him here like this. I’d never seen this place before, but I…I heard his voice somehow.”

“You as well?”

“I felt I owe him an apology. Him and Jon both.”

“Jon?” Sansa frowns.

“It is not my story to tell.”

There’s more to this, plenty that Sansa doesn’t know but also doesn’t have the time to think about. She can’t stop thinking about the fresh wounds on Theon’s chest.

“The water,” she says. “Have you seen anything go in it? Do you know what it is?”

Lady Catelyn nods. “One other soul. An Ironborn soldier. He went beneath and never came back up.”

Sansa shivers, licks her lips and tastes salt. Theon had told her, briefly, about his Drowned God as they fled from Ramsay’s hounds, explaining who it was he mouthed silent prayers to. The idea of it still wracks Sansa with foreign dread. But here it must be, just like her weirwood—protecting its own.

Protecting or claiming?

She tries, desperately, to remember anything else Theon had told her about the religion of the Iron Islands. Everything lurks just below the surface of her panic, a dark, shapeless form undulating through her imagination. She hadn’t known the sea before she left Winterfell. She hadn’t grown up with it the way Theon had.

The water laps at his navel. Sansa swears, when she first saw him, it had only reached his hipbones.

“I can’t,” she mumbles, her vision going blurry. “I can’t reach him—I don’t know—”

“Sansa,” her mother says softly, her tone inscrutable and sad, but it snaps Sansa back to a moment.

They’d sat in front of the fire. Sansa had begged her mother to tell her the legends of the Children of the Forest and the Old Gods, but she’d heard them enough times that when Catelyn tiredly began to recite them again, Sansa had burst into tears. The only one who had been able to calm her was Theon, sullen and reticent up until then, a recent enough addition to their hearthside scene that Sansa was still enthralled by him instead of annoyed.

“Would you like me to tell you about the sirens?” he’d asked. “They sit on the sea, and they sing songs so sad that no man can hear them without weeping. Some of them throw themselves into the water and drown, for they cannot bear to live after hearing the words.”

Sansa had nodded, her mother’s disdain only spurring her enthusiasm.

“They’re pale as ice,” Theon said. “They have long hair—longer than even yours—and some of them, the very best ones, can summon the Drowned God with their song.”

“The Drowned God?”

Theon had waved his hand impatiently. Sansa remembers his green eyes glittering in the firelight, seeming to shimmer with motion, and wondering if that’s what the sea looked like.

“Like your Old Gods, except better.” Behind them, Catelyn had scoffed. “He calls us to his hall beneath the waves when we die. He sleeps on the seabed, but the sirens—the best ones—he answers their song, and he grants them favors, sometimes.”

The entire thing had been too theoretical for Sansa then, with no notion of the sea, much less the Drowned God, to fuel her imagination. But now—she thinks she might understand.

She turns to her mother one last time.

“You can’t come with me, can you?”

Lady Catelyn shakes her head, a wistful smile transforming her face, and for a moment, she looks young again. “No, my love. I’ve been here too long.”

“I wish I could—” Sansa extends her arms as far as she can reach them toward her mother. They ache with the absence.

“I know.”

Catelyn similarly reaches out, one pale hand cupped as if to hold Sansa’s cheek, hovering inches from her face. “Tell me,” she says hoarsely. “Bran and Arya—and Jon…they’re safe?”

Nobody is safe, Sansa thinks, not for a while longer. But she remembers Jon’s laugh, more carefree than any she’d heard in the past year, when he’s with the Targaryen queen; the glances Arya had snatched at the Baratheon boy across the trestle table in Winterfell’s hall. And Bran—even he seems to thaw now with the coming of spring, from the hints of true emotion that Sansa had caught.

“They’re happy,” she says finally. “The pack survives, mother.”

Catelyn sighs and closes her eyes, the slightest upward tilt at the edges of her lips. As Sansa turns away, she knows it’s the last time she’ll see her mother, in this life or the one before.

The water has covered Theon’s stomach. It rises up to bisect his forearms. The overwhelming darkness makes him seem thinner, paler, the lacerations across his body a more violent red.

Sansa sinks to her knees and begins to hum.

It’s the only thing she can think to do, and the only song she can conjure to her mind: an old one her Septa used to sing to her, a romantic relic of childhood that she’d only just remembered again.

She opens her mouth: “ _Jenny would dance with her ghosts…”_

The sound echoes back, her voice splitting and cracking against the stone, a ghostly chorus that raises gooseflesh on Sansa’s arms. For the first time since she came below, she is well and truly cold.

She sings faster.

The water begins to churn.

Sansa wants to close her eyes against it but she will not let Theon leave her sight. She keeps singing, the words stilted with age, and doesn’t stop even when she has to crawl backwards from the water’s roiling, encroaching edge.

She speeds up the melody again, suddenly feeling sick, feeling the wrongness of the whole situation, a lurch in her gut that spreads coldness throughout her whole body. The water rises faster. She could swear it’s reaching for her. Theon—she thinks, she prays—twitches, the smallest flicker of his eyelids, the sharp flex of his neck.

The air grows thick. Her mouth is gummy, salt and something else more insidious, blood—no, iron. Each word is a battle and her tongue is her sword, and yet she still ekes them out, over and over, until her voice crescendos around the cavern: “ _and she never wanted to leave_ …”

The water swells, surges, falls flat.

Sansa gasps. Her throat is a column of fire; her nails scrabble desperately at the dirt. But she still can’t see the green of Theon’s eyes, and she forces out the last line.

There is no echo now, only her own voice, small and trembling on its own, as she sings “ _and the ones who had loved her the most._ ”

Theon opens his eyes.

She tries to cry out with the last of her breath, but she is monumentally tired, her tongue a useless piece of lead. She stares and reaches out, watching his eyes land on her.

They are blank, unfocused, scared. She hasn’t done it—it’s not him.

But then he blinks, and Sansa watches his chest expand with breath, his brows raise, his eyes sharpen, his hands move. His lips begin to shape her name.

“Theon,” Sansa croaks, letting her eyes flutter shut for the briefest of moments, the relief nearly unbearable.

When she opens them, though, he is gone, and the water is grey and unbroken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm back ;) just in time for the last (and thematically appropriate) day of theonsa week haha  
> this will be finished!!! and regularly updated!!! i just keep getting sidetracked by random aus LOL


	5. as a dream

She is hungry.

The realization is a dull shock in her haze of anger and hurt. She’s not sure how long she’s spent on the rocky floor in the dark, knees pulled into her chest and fingers trembling against her shins; time has ceased to have any real meaning for her. She knows only that she is cold and tired, and now, with a start, that she is hungry.

Sansa has not eaten since she came below. She’d begun to wonder, before she saw Theon, if she would even need to, or if something about her had changed when she hurtled through the heart tree’s embrace. But now she realizes she’s only been ignoring her body’s urges; the only reason they’ve become familiar to her again is that she’d rather think of the hunger, because the other pains—the ones that reside at the crown of her head and deep down in her chest—are infinitely worse.

Sansa is hungry, and tired, and furious, and she stays that way until they all blend into one monotonous note of numbness.

There’s no catalyst to break her out of it—only the realization, slowly, that she has been kneeling in the dirt for so long that the cold has seeped into her skin and spread through all her bones. She raises her head and looks at the water. Without Theon to break it, it’s become a mirror—perfectly still and clear and dark, her face a pale phantom in its surface. If she stays here much longer, it won’t matter that she came here with a beating heart. She’ll be just like her mother and Shireen and Melisandre all the same.

As she works her jaw, her reflection looks, almost, like another woman trapped beneath the water’s surface, her red hair a halo. The siren Theon had told her about, maybe, which _does_ live beneath the waves, just as the Drowned God’s eternal court does.

There would have been no out for Theon. Not if the thing that’s taken him is what Sansa thinks it is. There would have only been a _below_.

Cautiously, Sansa’s hands skitter out across the dirt, seeking anything big enough to hold. Her fingers seize around a pebble, jagged and dark, and she turns it over once, twice in her palm as she makes a wish and then throws it gently into the water.

The stone makes a silent splash. There is no resounding sizzle, nor the plume of steam she’d seen earlier. Whatever the angry thing lurking in the depths had been, it seems to have calmed. Maybe, like her, Theon had drawn it here, and it had departed with him.

It doesn’t stop Sansa from holding her breath as she eases her toe into the pool.

She doesn’t feel the water at first. Her boots are thick, having been made to withstand the wet snow that had blanketed Winterfell for years now, and they hold up well as she takes one tentative step into the pool, then another. It’s only when it reaches her shins that the water begins to flow over the tops of her boots, soaking through her dress immediately, chilling her to the bone and weighing her down. But it doesn’t sizzle or burn against her knees. It feels like a very uncomfortable embrace. Uncomfortable, but necessary.

She trudges forward until it rises to meet her waist. Her hands skim across the surface. The incline is steeper than she had imagined; she won’t reach the spot where Theon was while still standing, and she doubts she can swim whilst bogged down with all the heavy fabric. Does she still need to breathe here?

If she drowns here, now, alone, will she wake up above, or will she simply disappear?

Her hands break the still plane of the surface. The water laps at her ribs, and every step Sansa takes is a fight against her baser instincts to get out. She tempers them with thoughts of Theon, still and pale and sad and pained. It’s not quite cold where she is, but the sensation of the water tangling her skirts about her legs is a familiar one—known to her from when Theon took her hand and guided her through the icy river. He had been the only spot of warmth in that agonizing journey. His hands, his firm grip had kept her tethered to an idea of what humanity was, had stopped her from becoming yet another piece of frozen debris, drifting gently down the current.

Sansa would have to be the same for him now.

When it rises to her neck, she stops moving forward, fear suddenly overtaking her. She’s nearly reached the center of the pool, and everything around her is dark and quiet, the only sound her heavy breathing. Her next step will put her mouth below the surface; her next five will plunge her beneath entirely. Hunger gnaws at her stomach, reminding her that she can feel pain all too well, and that the sensation of cold, clammy water filling her lungs will surely be even worse—

Sansa takes a deep breath and forges forward before she can form another thought.

The silence is complete. It molds around her like a cloak, taking her into its arms, and to her surprise, Sansa finds it strangely comforting—it is so encompassing that it empties the thoughts in her head right along with the air around her, making everything muted. When she opens her eyes, the water doesn’t sting. There isn’t anything to see, until there is—filtering up from the bottom, tangling in delicate filaments around her fingers, a wavering but constant light.

The bottom is smooth. The water no longer seems to hold her back, but instead, urges her forward with gentle hands at the small of her back. _Go, go and find him_.

She goes.

-

The world takes shape around her out of the crash of the waves.

When it is done, Sansa stands on the shore. The water recedes from her, lapping at her feet until it’s gone entirely and growing more violent with every swell. Her eyes follow it out across the entirety of the stormy sea. She doesn’t recognize the scene, but it feels as if it _could_ be familiar—or at least, there is nothing so obviously wrong about it that it couldn’t belong to her own world. Except for the darkness, still there, still forever.

Now, though, there is lightning, the occasional blinding crack that allows Sansa to piece out details: pillars of stone in the distance, the tumultuous shore stretching out endless on one side, into a sheer face of rock on the other.

And then, in the third burst, she sees him.

It’s only a male form, hunched and kneeling in the sand, but Sansa knows there isn’t anyone else it could be. She knows his form—she knows his spirit. The sand slips beneath her feet as she runs, her cries swallowed in each clap of thunder, but she cries anyway, cries his name over and over and over until finally he looks up.

Theon’s mouth drops open. His eyes go wide. Sansa has the horrible thought, moments before she falls to her own knees, that he will be like her mother and she won’t be able to touch him. If she can’t feel his arms around her, she thinks she may splinter away into storm shards of her own.

But no, she falls, and he catches her.

Theon shudders against her. His fingers convulse on her back, clutching at her cloak, her hair. Sansa’s roam over every bit of him that she can touch. They take in every scar, every bruise, every fresh-bleeding wound, and she takes them all into herself, imagines herself taking the pain from each cut she trails her fingers across. He sobs, and a moment later, she does too.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Theon gasps. “Not you. Not you.”

“I came for you.”

“Sansa.” Her name in his voice is the sweetest song, and yet she can hear the pain in the way it cracks. “I wanted to protect you, oh gods—you should have lived years and years—I couldn’t—”

“Theon!”

She takes his face in her hands, pulls back, just slightly, every inch a torment. She can see his eyes now, though, and they are even more vivid than she ever could have remembered.

“I haven’t died,” she whispers. “I’ve come to take you home.”

The pale column of his throat shifts as he swallows, works his jaw, lips half-forming words that don’t materialize, until he croaks “why?”

“I had to, Theon. I heard you calling. Your voice, in my head, and I couldn’t leave you—”

“Why me?”

He hangs his head. His curls are matted to his forehead from the rain, and she sweeps them back, desperate not to lose sight of his eyes. “Of everyone you’ve lost—why _me_? I don’t deserve it, Sansa. I’m not—not _whole_ , I knew what was going to happen when I went out there with Bran because I knew I had to do it. For what I did to your family. I deserve to be here—”

“No.” Sansa shakes her head fiercely, wet hair whipping about the both of them. Her fingertips press into Theon’s cheeks and leave bloodless imprints. “Don’t say that. Everyone else might not think so, but you repaid that debt, you repaid it a thousand times over. You saved me. You saved Bran. You saved _everyone_ , Theon.”

“He didn’t—” Theon chokes.

“They’re all gone. All of the White Walkers. Because of you. Because you held them off, and then Arya stabbed the Night King, and they all just…went. Because of you.”

Sansa leans forward until their foreheads are pressed together. Her heart thrums with worry that if she closes her eyes, he’ll disappear once again, but she does and she still feels his hands on the small of her back, warm and strong and there.

“You fought for me,” she whispers. “Now let me fight for you.”

A heartbeat. A thundercrack. And then she feels him nod.

-

At the end of the shore, there is a cave cut into the cliff face. It is lit with two torches at the entrance. Their flames don’t flicker, despite the howling wind.

They stumble through the mouth of it, clutching each other, and hunched against the rain, until finally they can stand. Sansa keeps her arms about Theon’s waist anyway. She doesn’t want to let go of him, but more than that, she doesn’t think she even can.

“It’s the Iron Islands,” Theon says.

“What?”

“This place. It’s the shore of one of the outer islands. Not Pyke, but connected to it. This cave, though—I’ve never seen it before.”

“Do you remember where you were before this?” Sansa asks.

Theon’s brow furrows. “I remember darkness, and agony. And then your voice, another…another voice, someone I didn’t know, and then I was floating on my back and I washed up to shore.”

He winces, then, as if remembering whatever pain he’d experienced in the darkness, and sags against Sansa. She sees that some of the lacerations on his arms have reopened, and they are oozing dark blood down over his knuckles. He’s shivering, too, a motion that reminds her too much of his nervous trembling under Ramsay’s stare.

“Here.” She swings the cloak off her shoulders and gets it around Theon’s. He doesn’t even try to protest, just sinks into it, tugging it closed around him.

“Sansa, how did you get here?”

“I…it’s a long tale. I’d rather see you somewhere safe first.”

Theon laughs, but it’s a bitter sound. “I don’t think there’s anywhere safe here.”

“As safe as can be.”

He fixes her with a stare that’s nearly too hard for her to hold, like looking at the sun. “For me,” he says wonderingly. “You came here for me. You.”

“I did.”

Sansa slips her hand into his and locks their fingers tight. “Where will we go?”

-

The cave becomes a tunnel. It is dark, and dank, and Sansa doesn’t want to linger on the strange sounds that echo through it, but she has Theon’s warmth at her side and that’s enough to make it more comforting than any other part of her journey thus far.

It slopes upward gently at first, then it steepens until they’re climbing rough-hewn stairs through the darkness. Petrichor fills Sansa’s nose. They squeeze against each other in the slim space, rather than let go of each other’s hands. She never realized what a comfort the sound of Theon’s breath is, or what a relief it is to her how steady it is.

“The cliff,” Theon says. “It’s leading us up.”

“What’s there?”

They step out of the tunnel into the same angry sky they’d left behind, only a trifle lighter than the place they left behind. Before them sweeps a black clifftop, covered in dark stone and rain; and beyond that lies a looming outline, rough and stark against the sky, a castle made from shadows.

“My family’s home,” Theon says.

 _But not yours,_ Sansa thinks.

The gates are open for them. A rope bridge sways across a great chasm. Theon grits his teeth when he sees it and clutches Sansa tighter, pulling her into the warmth of the cloak.

“We shouldn’t.”

His voice is rough. Sansa cranes her neck to look him in the eyes.

“We need somewhere to rest. You need to heal. I don’t know how far we’ll have to go after this.” _Or where, or how. But I will bring you home_.

“I don’t know what’s in there,” Theon murmurs. “Or who.”

“They can’t hurt you, Theon.”

He startles, a tremor running through him that passes through Sansa as well, pressed so close to him. “They already did, though. There were Northerners here, men who died before they knew I…”

Her hand drops to his chest, splays over the cuts there. “Not anymore,” she promises. “They can’t touch you. And if they try to, I won’t let them.”

Theon wets his lips, his eyes roving over Sansa’s face, wide as marbles. She thinks he’s going to say something, but all he does is murmur her name, low and reverent.

The bridge sways violently beneath them, but it does not snap, and they do not let go of each other. Sansa dares a glance to the west and nearly loses her breath. The sea is seething. It foams along the shore, angry waves driving relentlessly up the rock and up again. She swears, beneath the waves, she can see something vast and dark and lurking.

“I think he’s angry,” Theon says.

She sees that he’s looking out, too, his gaze fixed on the dark horizon. “I heard him in my head,” Theon continues. “Quietly, but there. When I washed up here. He said I was free to go, if I could. But he didn’t sound happy about it.”

Sansa understands. Now that she has him back, she couldn’t imagine letting him go again, either.

-

The castle of Pyke is empty. At first, it is eerie, but Sansa quickly becomes grateful for how still it is around them as weariness overtakes her. She doesn’t have the energy for another fight.

As tired as she is, though, she tends to Theon first, getting him huddled in front of the fireplace in Pyke’s drafty great hall before scouring the space for tinder. Only when a fire is blazing in the hearth—not as bright as the fire she knows, but warm enough nonetheless—does she sink down beside Theon, a tablecloth clutched in her hands, which she wraps about his body like a blanket.

“I’m going to go find you food,” she says. “And bandages, and some warmer clothes.”

She makes to stand, but Theon’s arm darts out of the mountain of fabric to catch her wrist. “Wait,” he says, his tone plaintive. “Just stay here a moment with me.”

“Of course,” Sansa says, and falls back to the stone.

They stare into the flames for long minutes, shoulders pressed together, until Theon speaks.

“I feel different.”

“How?”

“I can hurt now.”

Sansa winces, and Theon puts a hand on her knee, shaking his head. “No, it’s a good thing. Before, I knew I was being harmed, but it all felt so hazy to me. I thought maybe I’d forgotten how to properly feel pain after everything that had happened.”

He pauses, looking down at his hands, at the space where one of his fingers is still missing. Sansa covers it with hers. “But I feel the pain now, again. I feel everything again. There were times, when I was wandering about with the dead, when I thought I might forget it all. Forget you. And that hurt more than anything that anyone was doing to me.”

“You don’t belong here with them,” Sansa murmurs, her fingers tracing circles on the back of Theon’s wrist.

“Where do I belong?”

“At Winterfell. Home, with me.”

He tells her where to find blankets and directs her to the kitchen off the great hall. He tries to come, but Sansa urges him back down in front of the hearth, surreptitiously pressing a hand against his chest to see if his skin has warmed at all, or if his heartbeat has quickened. Both have risen in slight degrees, and it’s the only reason she can bear to leave his side at all. She finds old wine in the kitchen alongside hard black bread—traveler’s tack, Jon would have called it, but darker than she’d ever seen it before. She wonders, briefly, if it might not be such a good idea to eat this world’s offerings, but the hunger is too intense. It tastes of dust, but it fills her stomach.

The wine is a little better. Cloyingly sweet and blood-red. Theon and Sansa pass it back and forth before the fire, taking long gulps before Sansa lowers her hands to Theon’s chest again.

“Can I?”

He furrows his brow, but nods.

She tries to be as gentle as she can. There’s dried blood caked over his stomach that hadn’t come away with the seawater. Splashes echo through the hall as she dips a rag in water and brushes it over his skin, the only sound besides Theon’s heavy breath. Sansa lifts her eyes; his lips are parted.

“You don’t have to—”

“I do.”

His lips quirk up at the corners.

“I saw my mother,” Sansa says, returning her attention to his chest. Beneath the blood is a web of silvery scars, thin and delicate, like gossamer across his body.

“Lady Catelyn is still here?”

“I don’t think she is anymore.”

Theon sighs. “Robb wasn’t.”

“I know.” She gently pushes the cloak off one shoulder and turns to Theon’s back, where the scars are even worse. “Did you hope he was?”

“I don’t know. There are so many things I would’ve liked to say to him, but I’m glad he didn’t have to linger here. I wouldn’t wish that on him. On anyone, really.”

Sansa sweeps wide circles across his shoulder blades, feeling the tension there, before lifting the bandages from the floor. They’re nothing but shreds of an old jerkin, but they’ll do.

As she lifts his arm to circle his stomach with fabric, she asks “what happened to you, Theon?”

She isn’t truly sure she wants to know, but she owes him this—to listen, to help him heal from it, however he can. It’s not as if she can hurt any more than he already does.

Beneath her hands, she feels tremors run through him, and she presses down on his shoulders, grounding him to the rocky floor. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

“No.” He shivers once more, then the tremors subside.

“I woke at the Wall. We all did. The Ironborn, and Jorah and Lyanna Mormont, and all of the Northern soldiers. People I didn’t know, either. Empty eyes. They just…drifted. Wights, maybe, I think.”

Sansa shudders as she presses the end of the bandage to his hip. She curls up against his side, and Theon holds open the cloak for her, letting her steal into his heat.

“I took as many of the Ironborn as I could and ran. We didn’t know if the wights were still dangerous. But none of us had been beyond the Wall before, and we were separated in the darkness. I tried to find my way back, but all I could find was a heart tree. There were Northerners. Men of Winterfell.” Theon lowers his chin. “Men that my men killed, and they’d never gotten their vengeance.”

“Oh, Theon,” Sansa breathes.

He chuckles bitterly. “Turns out even as a ghost, I can still bleed.”

Suddenly, she’s angry—not at the Northerners for enacting revenge, but at the gods themselves for letting _this_ be Theon’s end, after all he’d done in life to make up for his actions. How long would he have been trapped here, if she hadn’t come? He had _died_ for them; how had that not been enough?

And worse yet is the way he speaks of it, so quiet and matter-of-fact—as if he truly believes that this is what he deserved.

“They let me go when they grew bored. I couldn’t die again, and after a while, I didn’t react at all. I was lost in the darkness, but then I heard this voice in my head. It sounded like my Uncle Victarion, more than anything, and it was telling me that I could be at peace, that it would care for me. So I went.”

“And did you find peace?” Sansa whispers.

He shakes his head. “I found oblivion. And then your voice.”

Sansa tells him of her journey, too—of Bran, and of the Red Woman and Shireen Baratheon and her mother, and her reunion with Lady and how big she’d grown. The subject of the dark Winterfell she’d seen is the only one she avoids. Theon seems strong in the same way the ice over the pond in the Godswood is; it may look as sturdy as could be at first glance, but could splinter into shards at the wrong kind of pressure. She couldn’t stand to see him do so right now.

Instead, she passes him the wine, smooths the knots from the muscles of his shoulders, and sings to him—only the sweetest songs she knows, the ones she hadn’t sung since she was a child and such songs were all she knew of the future. He relaxes, bit by bit, into her hands, until she’s curled around him, the fire dying low before them.

“Theon,” she says as he closes his eyes. “I heard your voice.”

“When?”

“In my head, from the moment I found out you had…” She swallows.

Theon turns, his nose bumping Sansa’s cheek. “There wasn’t a moment I wasn’t thinking of you. Maybe that’s why. I thought, when I couldn’t move on like so many of my soldiers did—I assumed it was because I didn’t know if you and Bran and Arya were safe.”

She opens her mouth, closes it again, and just nods. There isn’t anything else for her to say. Instead, she twines her arms about Theon’s chest and stares into the embers until they disappear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is brought to you by kd lang's cover of hallelujah on repeat for 3 hours  
> 6 coming soon!!! more regular updates from here on out hopefully <3


	6. lodestar

The storm breaks before they wake.

Sansa doesn’t know how long she sleeps, only that when she awakes, she’s been moved from the hard stone floor to some kind of divan in the corner, and that she’s covered in a heavy woolen blanket. In the next moment, she realizes she can’t see Theon, and she sits up, startled.

“Good morning,” his voice says, and then chuckles at his joke.

He’s sitting on the floor, eyes fixed on her and expression soft. Sansa feels warmth bloom up her throat. “Have you slept?”

“Not as long as you did.” Theon rises, stretching out his arms. “I think I’m still growing used to being human again.”

“You didn’t sleep before?”

“Or eat or drink.” He shrugs. “I had no need to.”

It sounds horrible, but Sansa doesn’t let herself say that. Instead, she gestures to the pile at Theon’s feet. “What’s that?”

“Things I thought we might need.”

It’s a motley assortment of fabric, candles, bottles and rope, metal glinting from somewhere deep within. It’s only then she’s noticed Theon’s got on a shirt and jerkin, his ragged breeches exchanged for long pants and boots. Across his back is strapped a full quiver.

“Can we actually hurt the dead?” Sansa asks.

Theon adjusts the quiver. “They could hurt me.”

Like everything else she’d found, the things in Theon’s collection are just slightly off: a dress that’s too dark, the fabric too cool and slippery for any she’d known; the blades of the daggers are dusky, as if they’d been infused with shadows when they were tempered. He’d found more of the awful black bread. Sansa almost wishes he hadn’t.

“Are you sure you’re ready to leave? We don’t have to go yet,” she says.

“We do,” Theon says. “We can’t linger here. I don’t belong here anymore. You never have.” Hesitantly, he lifts a hand to her cheek, letting his fingertips trail across her skin. “You’re too pale.”

“I’m not the one I’m worrying about.”

“Well, I am,” Theon says.

But he’s right, of course. Sansa doesn’t want to stay below a moment longer than she has to, either. It’s agony not knowing how the world moves on above them. Jon and Daenerys must have reached King’s Landing by now. Arya may have her dagger buried in Cersei’s throat already.

They may all be laid out across the streets of King’s Landing, blood pooling about their heads.

“We’ll go,” Sansa agrees.

-

She leaves the old dress, but keeps her leather bodice, her needle, Arya’s knife. Theon straps a bow to her back, even though she never truly learned to aim; by now, she’s building up her own little arsenal. Before they leave the damp, echoing hall, Theon lingers in the doorway, his eves roving across the arcing windows. “I may not see it again,” he explains when he sees her questioning look. Even though Sansa wants to argue, she knows he’s right—Euron is a force that can’t be predicted, nor controlled. She just wishes _this_ isn’t the way Theon may have to remember his birthright.

Night darkness still coats the sky over Pyke, but the storm seems to have ceased, to Sansa’s relief. They inch back across the swaying rope bridge; the moment Theon’s feet land on the other side, it crumbles away into dust.

“Well,” Theon says, and she’s proud to hear the humor winning over the fright in his voice, “there’s no going back, then.”

The cliffs are blustery, the sky still pregnant with the threat of more rain. Mist curls about the edges of the moor. Sans watches it coil up Theon’s legs, twining about his knees like searching fingers, and imagines them pulling him back down into the earth. She grabs for his hand.

“Winterfell,” she says. “That’s where we’ll have to go. I don’t know if there’s another heart tree outside of the North.”

“That’s hundreds of miles away,” Theon says doubtfully.

“I walked from Winterfell to the Wall in a single step. There has to be another way. I just don’t know how to make it happen.”

Sansa sighs, suddenly overcome with exhaustion. It’s the same brittle-boned ache she’d felt in the forest. She’s gone too long without feeling the sun.

“We’ll just go,” Theon says, determined. “We’ll keep going, and we’ll find something eventually—” He breaks off, going pale as his eyes slip past Sansa and to something behind her.

“What’s happening?”

On the inky horizon behind them is a great mass of void. It swirls above the waves, blacker on black.

“Theon, what _is_ that?” There are barely words available to her to describe it. Sansa had never seen such a thing before.

Theon, though, is shaking his head, his pupils blown wide. “We have to go. Now, Sansa. He’s coming for me.”

“Who—”

The sea surges up to meet the swirl. _Oh_. She should have known.

The Drowned God had let her have Theon, but he’d never promised to let her keep him.

Craggy stone and rough foliage blur under their feet as they dash forward, the sudden motion turning the ache in Sansa’s bones to pain. She concentrates on Theon’s hand in hers as he pulls her along. The breath in her lungs rattles, and the air suddenly feels colder, heavier—whether it truly is, or if it’s just a ghost of memory overlaying itself from the snowy fields outside Winterfell onto this, she can’t tell.

One day, Theon’s hand in hers will no longer mean that they are running for their lives.

Behind them, the roar of the storm grows louder; before them, the sky grows darker, if it’s even possible. Skirts tangle around Sansa’s legs and she curses the heavy material. Theon’s breath comes ragged in her ears. The urge to glance behind them and see how fast the storm is advancing is overpowering—as if they could outrun a god in his own domain in the first place, naïve and broken things that they are. She gasps and turns her head—

“Sansa!”

She only catches a glimpse of the darkness before Theon’s voice rings out, and she snaps back around, but it’s too late. The cliff edge is looming up before them and Theon has stopped, but her feet won’t halt, she can’t find purchase and he will not let go of her hand—

With a cry, they hurtle down into oblivion.

-

Sunlight.

It’s not warm, but it’s a sensation Sansa immediately recognizes and will never again take for granted. It beats through her eyelids, splaying a network of red veins across her vision, and although it’s unpleasant, she’s loath to open them. She’s so comfortable, _finally_ , even with what feels like gravel jutting into her back and her cloak twisted about her neck.

Her left hand flexes, empty, and that’s when Sansa opens her eyes.

The cliff stretches overhead, but much closer than she’d expected. She’d thought she was falling forever. There are no signs of the storm. The sky is the cloudless, pale blue of late autumn, with a brisk breeze to match.

She sits up, flexing each muscle as she does so to make sure nothing’s broken. Nothing but that same deep ache. Her mouth goes dry to feel it—she’d dreamt, for a moment, they’d fallen back into their own world.

But no, she can feel that they’re still below, and she can see that the place they are is nowhere near the Iron Islands. The grass is long and reedy, and the stone is a different color, flaky sheets of slate that rise above her on both sides like foreboding arms. She knows this place, somehow.

She looks to her left, but he isn’t there.

“Theon?”

Sansa holds her breath until she hears a groan. She stumbles to her feet, tripping over her own cloak as she hurries over to where the sound had come from.

He’s curled in on himself, hair in disarray, but when she leans over him he unfurls. “What…”

“We moved forward,” she says gently. “We’re somewhere else, now.”

He sits up, sea-blue eyes darting about as he takes in the scene. “This isn’t—how did we end up here? Sansa, I’ve never seen this place before. We were—”

“It hasn’t happened to you before? One moment, you’re somewhere, and the next you’re a thousand miles away?”

“Never.” He shakes his head vigorously.

Sansa smooths his hair back, trying to head off his confusion before it becomes something worse. “It’s happened to me a few times now. The shape of the world is different down here, somehow.”

“It never was before.” Theon’s face crinkles into a mass of weary lines as he frowns. “Why has it changed?”

They watch the sun, still for a moment in its nearly forgotten light. Against the skin of her arm, Theon’s heartbeat plays a steady tattoo.

“Maybe it hasn’t changed,” Sansa says slowly. “ _You’ve_ changed.”

Theon blinks. She can see him wrap his mind around the idea.

“From the beginning, the rules of this place have never behaved properly for me. I don’t belong here.” Sansa takes his hand between both of her own and turns it over, palm up, to feel the heartbeat at his wrist. “And now you don’t, either.”

He sucks in a breath. “You think—”

“Do _you_ think?”

Silence, and then she sees his head bob once, twice, in growing acquiescence.

“I feel heavier.”

“Is that good?”

He sighs. “My body is my own again. That is what it is, I suppose.”

“Oh.” Somehow, she’d been hoping against hope that he’d come back whole—that whatever he’d suffered in death would be enough to erase his suffering in life. But since when had the world seen fit to create goodness on its own?

Theon flexes first one hand, then the other, still encased between Sansa’s palms. “We’d better look around,” he says. “I don’t suppose this is any closer to Winterfell than Pyke?”

Sansa shakes her head. “But I do think I know where we are.”

-

After only a few steps, she knows she’s right.

“The Vale.” The low, sleek cliffs become familiar, the starkness of the scene aligning against her memory. “It’s the Vale. We’re near the Eyrie.”

Theon glances about with wide eyes. “Never been to this part of the country before.”

“I was here with Litt—with Petyr Baelish, a long time ago. Before I—saw you again.”

“Do you think that’s why we’re here? That he’s—”

“No,” Sansa says shortly.

But as her aunt’s tower rises out of the slate-colored sky like a plume of smoke, she can’t help but wonder, as well. There had been someone in every place she’d gone so far, or save that, an army of ghosts. Nothing had been random—she’d never landed in the Reach, or Essos, and she’s glad for it. But it doesn’t stop her from half-wanting to run from the tower until the memory of cold stone is as foreign as a dream.

And yet she knows that’s not what they’re meant to do. Sansa can feel it. These places that they’re drawn to—they have to confront them, somehow. And even if Aunt Lysa or Littlefinger is here, she’ll have Theon. From here on out, she’ll always have Theon.

As they draw near the gates to the Eyrie, the cliffs on either side of them stretching up higher and higher until they drop into mist, she feels a brush against the back of her hand. Theon, who had been walking a few steps in front of her, has stopped; one arm is outstretched to her. She realizes how much she’s slowed.

“We don’t have to go in, you know.”

“We do,” she says.

“We don’t. We can walk right past it. We can walk all the way to the Kingsroad, to the sea if we have to. I’ll take you there.”

And as tempting as it sounds—a life by the sea with Theon, salt and breeze in his curls—the pulsing worry of what’s happening in the world she left behind is more alluring by far. This is the quickest way, and Sansa doesn’t know how much longer she can go without knowing that Arya is safe.

There’s another part, too, that gives her pause: nothing here is by chance. Sansa can tell that now. There is a reason she must ascend the Eyrie’s twisting stairs again, and she has a horrible suspicion that it has to do with the same ghosts that she’d seen in Winterfell.

Sansa lets Theon take her hand.

The path pitches upwards, turns into stairs. She can’t help but notice that they seem to have deteriorated since last she saw them; the low walls crumble away beneath her touch now, cascading pebbles to the forest that grows further and further away as they ascend. The air grows thinner, and her breathing grows shorter, or maybe that’s just the fear stealing away the room in her chest. _It can’t be worse than Winterfell._ _Nothing can_ , she thinks.

The scrape of wood on stone jars her bones when Theon heaves open the door to the tower’s base. All she can see inside is darkness, and then a few steps. When she cranes her neck up, she can see them spiral away from her, up and further up and further still, into muted light far, far above.

“How many steps are there?” Theon asks.

Sansa shrugs. She’s grown dizzy from staring at the light. “I’ve never counted.”

“Wouldn’t it be dangerous? I mean, wouldn’t people fall?”

She swallows thickly, tasting bile at the back of her throat, and lets go of his hand.

“You won’t. I’m sorry, Sansa. You’re safe. Whatever’s up there—it won’t hurt you.”

She believes him. He’s never lied to her about that before.

The dizziness intensifies as they climb, to the point where Sansa has to stop and lean her forehead against Theon’s back before she can go on. Each time, he glances back at her, his eyebrows knit together and eyes dark with worry, but she pushes on. Whether it’s the general exhaustion of the place—in her head, she’s begun to call it the death-sickness, even though it sends coils of revulsion through her when she thinks the words—or the actual climb, she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t particularly care. All she knows is that they stop and start again enough times that she almost thinks Theon’s about to call the entire endeavor off just before the muted light finally washes over them.

It’s her aunt’s seat of power. Dimmer and dustier, cobwebs at the corners whipped through with wind, but still the same cavernous, circular room, the throne in the middle ringed with shadows. As she stares, she can see herself descend the stairs, black skirts swishing about her legs, and at the bottom—

She jerks her chin down.

“What?” Theon says, spinning around. “Is something…”

But the voices have begun. They ring out around her, now, even as Sansa clears the final few steps to plant both feet on the cold stone. The first she hears is her cousin’s, nasal and high with youth, here and then gone, and the briefest memory of her father’s rich timbre melding with Jon Arryn’s laughter.

They fade into something that slides over her slickly and completely. Her name in Littlefinger’s voice, his name in hers’. His first name, imbued with an intimacy that turns her stomach.

“ _Sansa_ ,” Theon says urgently, but she’s lost to the ghosts.

She floats down the stairs again and again, growing thinner, taller, darker each time. Baelish catches her up each time, and seeing her own face is worse even than his again, because she can find not even a hint of wariness on it. She had trusted him, as fully as she trusted her father, and he had done—

Done _that_ , she thinks, as she watches her Aunt Lysa’s pale hands wrap around Sansa’s own throat.

Her cry rings out in tandem with her aunt’s as Lysa plunges through the moon door. She’s only vaguely aware of the hands on her shoulders, her back, her arms, and at first she thinks they must be Petyr’s, but no, she’s as helpless to change anything about this as she had been the first time. Her aunt continues to plunge until Theon’s face blocks everything else out.

“Just tell me what’s wrong!”

“You can’t see them?” she asks hoarsely.

“See what? Sansa, we’re alone here, I promise—”

Her eyes slide past Theon’s, to where Baelish waits, pulling her dark mirrored form into an embrace. Theon’s words fade to a background rush as she watches Baelish.

He’s looking at her.

Of course he’s not, he’s a ghost, they all are, but he _is_ , his beady black eyes skewering Sansa to the spot. Every inch of her skin feels dirty. She wants to look away, but she can’t.

Petyr Baelish lets her ghost go and starts walking toward Sansa. His lips are contorting around her name.

It’s dark, suddenly, and the smell of wool fills her nose. She breathes deep, realizing her lungs are screaming, and inhales musk and sea salt. Hands are in her hair, smoothing it down.

“There’s no one else here,” Theon says somewhere above her.

She clings to him, knowing if she doesn’t, she might fall down all those stairs. Theon holds her tight and doesn’t say anything else. He’s warm. Warmer than anything she’s felt in a long time.

“He saw me,” she mumbles into Theon’s chest.

He draws back enough to look at her, but keeps his arms around her, an anchor. “Who?”

“There are these ghosts. They were in Winterfell, and they’re here, too. Littlefinger, my aunt Lysa—me. Ghosts or memories, maybe. I thought they were just echoes. But Littlefinger, he looked at me, Theon. He _saw_ me.”

At _Winterfell_ , he’d made a strangled sound; the beginnings of panic are dawning across his face. She knows he’s had the same thought that she has. It might not just be Littlefinger. It might be _all_ of them.

“None of them have done that before?” he asks.

Sansa shakes her head. “I saw my whole family— _our_ whole family—and they couldn’t hear me.”

A new idea, nearly as horrible, comes to her then. She’d thought Theon’s warmth, the way she could touch him, meant he was coming back, becoming more like her. But what if Sansa was becoming more like the ghosts, instead?

She opens her mouth to express this new fear to him, but then his face is bathed in red light, and she blinks, losing the train of thought.

The doors at the end of the room across from them had swung open silently, and sunlight is pouring through. _Real_ sunlight, the kind that only comes at the end of a long summer’s day, blood-rosy and so heady that Sansa could drown in it. Like the sunsets she’d watched with Margaery from the balcony of the Red Keep, painting everything in that rich, intoxicating glow.

It’s not right, not here. She locks away the thoughts of Baelish and worse men than him and makes for the door.

The balcony that wraps about the Eyrie at its widest point had always frightened Sansa with its dangerously low walls. But there’s none of the wind that she remembers, and she rushes heedlessly to the balcony’s edge, trying to find the source of the light. There’s no sun in the sky, but something else is off about the scene, something that makes her eyes water. Sansa blinks until the stinging subsides.

And then she understands what it is. She can see everything.

In the distance, the sea glints—but not the sea she’d expected. In between her and the waves stretch miles of land, replete with mist-topped mountains and shimmering rivers tucked into the green valleys of the Vale. Beyond that, the craggy peaks of the Iron Islands stretch up to the red sky, but the longer she stares the sharper they become, until Sansa swears she can see the rope bridge she and Theon had stood on hours earlier. The bridge is not empty. Nothing is empty. The land seethes with people.

“Are you…” Theon comes to stand beside her, but she feels him rather than sees him, reluctant to tear her eyes from the pulsating world below.

“Yes,” Sansa says.

“Are they ghosts?”

In the distance, carried on a breeze destined just to reach Sansa’s ears, is a familiar roar. She spins about, rushing toward the other side of the balcony just as a shadow passes into view above them. _Two_ shadow.

“I don’t think they are.”

A glint of silver flashes atop one dragon, streaming in the wind. Sansa’s surprised at the intensity of the relief she feels at the sight of the dragon queen. She’s not dead, and this can’t be a memory—her third dragon is still gone, and far below, Sansa can see ships. Far, far below, she sees dark curls, a glinting sword topped with a wolf’s head, a brooding face peering out at the sea.

Somehow, they could see it all as it happened. This must be how Bran always feels, Sansa thinks in awe, and wonders how he can stand it. She feels as if she could go mad from looking for too long.

Footsteps echo across the stone. “Yara is at Pyke,” Theon says as he approaches her. “Arya rides the Kingsroad with Sandor Clegane. Is that the plan?”

“It’s what we all agreed on.” Sansa leans over the balcony, as if she could get closer to Jon just by that. “A three-pronged attack by land, sea, and sky. Bran and I were to stay in Winterfell with Brienne and Ser Jaime Lannister.”

“The Kingslayer is riding south as well.”

“What?”

The light changes. Rosy reds fade into crimson on the wings of Daenerys’s dragons, then into rich violets. They fly faster. The ships’ sails snap, and they glide forward at triple speed. Sansa clutches for Theon’s hand as the sky goes dark, fills with stars, and then goes orange and pink and blue again.

Her eyes follow the ships as they shoot like arrows toward Kings Landing. Red, black, violet, blue, over and over, until she loses track, until she sees it in the distance, another smoky smudge on the far horizon, moving as quickly towards Daenerys’s fleet as she flies towards Cersei.

A snap. A pained roar.

She waits, holding her breath, only vaguely aware that beside her, Theon’s breath has stopped as well.

Flames.

The smoke blots out the South, and then the horizon, and then everything. Sansa had thought the fire that raged through her home in the wake of their battle against the dead had been apocalyptic, but this is worse a thousand-fold, destruction embodied in the silver-haired queen that rises from the ashes.

It is terrifying. And yet Sansa finds herself filled with sorrow for Daenerys Targaryen.

“That’s—” Theon makes a choked sound. “How many died?”

“Thousands, I’d guess,” says Sansa quietly. “Maybe millions.”

“Because—”

“Because that’s what happens when you take everything from a woman.”

Of course she is horrified. But she cannot pretend she never had dreams of doing the same to the Dreadfort, burning Boltons and innocent servants with the same impunity. Daenerys terrifies Sansa, yes—but maybe terrifies her most of all for showing Sansa what she could become without Theon, without Arya and Jon and Bran, without Brienne and everyone else who had loved her.

“We have to stop him.”

“Him?” Sansa turns to Theon, tearing her eyes from the plume of smoke.

“Euron. He’s the one who started this. He shot down her dragon over Blackwater Bay.”

Sansa hadn’t even noticed who commandeered the ships. She had been too swept up in the spectacle. But of course it would make sense that Theon’s wild-eyed uncle, practically a legend to her, would have been the one. Theon had saved thousands with his death. With his life, though, maybe he could have prevented the tragedy that befell millions.

“It’s set in stone,” Sansa says. “It’s the way of fate. Isn’t it?”

“The way of fate was for me to die in the Godswood.” Theon smiles at her, soft even after the horror they’d just witnessed, and reaches one hand up to cup her cheek. “You’ve never seemed one to take the whims of fate lying down, Sansa Stark. Why start now?”

She exhales. She loves.

“Alright. But you’ll have to trust me.”

“With my life,” Theon swears. “Or whatever’s left of it.”

Sansa nods twice, hoping she is right. Then she steps up onto the low balcony, pulling Theon along behind her, and lets herself fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🖤🖤  
> yes this ones gonna be sympathetic to dany as well as sansa! i can't help it


	7. the fire i would walk through

Every time before, when the fabric of the world had collapsed beneath her feet and she’d taken steps ten miles at a time, Sansa hadn’t been able to see. Everything had gone black around her, underwater or in a tunnel or hurtling from a cliff, until she opened her eyes again and understood. This time, though, Sansa forces them to stay open even as the wind rips teardrops from her eyes.

They’re not falling down. They’re falling sideways.

Green hills roll by below them, fade into the parched basin of King’s Landing. The spires of the city loom up, and that’s when Sansa shuts her eyes, bracing for impact. But they keep falling, and falling, and falling.

Theon shouts something, but the wind steals his words before Sansa can hear them. She tries to open her eyes again, but finds she can’t; she’s as powerless to move as if she was frozen in ice. She grips his hand tighter and hopes he understands.

When they finally tumble down, it isn’t into stone or grass but into a salty surf that fills her nose and makes her sputter. When the burning subsides and she takes her first deep breath of smoke-tinged air, Sansa opens her eyes, expecting the sandy cliffs that hold up King’s Landing to be above her. But the sand is too white, the water too blue, the world too golden and primal.

Theon lays beside her, still joined to her at the hand, but unmoving. Sansa scrambles across the sand until she can get her hands on his chest and wait while he expels saltwater from his lungs. But once he’s done, his panic doesn’t subside. His eyes open and stare up at her—but they don’t focus on her. They’ve gone milky-white.

“Sansa,” Theon moans. “I can’t see you—where—”

They snap up to stare at the sky, and he clutches her hand convulsively. “Are we below?”

“We’re on a beach,” Sansa says softly. “Theon, can you see anything?”

Blank white eyes shiver and then go still. Hesitantly, he shakes his head.

“I can feel you.”

“Alright.” She exhales. “We can—we can find you help.”

Except that she has no idea where they are, who else might or might not live here. The longer she looks, the more foreign the place seems to her, the distant mountains formed from a glassy black stone that she’s never seen before and all the plants just as unfamiliar. She can’t hear another voice—there is nothing but the wind.

“Are we in King’s Landing?”

“I don’t think we’re anywhere in Westeros,” she murmurs, her voice cracking.

The sky to the east is red. Fiery red, as if the entire horizon had been engulfed in dragon flame.

“Valyria,” she whispers.

Theon jerks beneath her. “Are you sure?”

“I hope that I’m wrong.”

Sansa pulls herself to her feet before leaning down and getting her arms around Theon’s shoulders. He’s shorter than her by a breath, and it helps as she guides him down the beach, even though Sansa knows there’s nothing wrong with his legs or his head. It’s just that they’ve come so far. She couldn’t stand to see anything happen to him now. Not after everything they’d been through, after being so close to having him back, to keep this time.

When he asks her why she won’t let go of him, though, all Sansa says is: “the ground is rocky.”

The same sensation of being led by an invisible hand pulls her forward. Sansa considers fighting it, but realizes quickly that she has nowhere else to go. It hasn’t steered her wrong yet—not really. It had led her to Theon, after all. Now it leads them through a gap in the glassy rock, away from the idyllic beachhead, the air growing hotter around them as the sky grows redder and Sansa’s heart speeds up.

She’d never been beyond the sea, but she’d heard enough stories to feel as though she had. Arya had loved the ones of old Valyria when they were young—the dragon-riding queens, the dynasties of fire, the doom that rained down upon the land. Arya had especially loved that bit. It had made Sansa shiver every time she heard it.

Now, the same shivers return as she sees the peaks in the distance begin to spew red. Sansa almost wonders if she should pray to the gods for protection, and then remembers that there are no gods here that will listen to her, only those too ancient to be able to name.

When the ground turns from stone to a strange black sea of glass, she stops. Theon stumbles against her and then rights himself. “Are you alright? What’s happened?”

“Nothing. I just…” Her eyes rove the landscape, the gap carved out between walls of mountains all around them, the wide plain of that same strange glassy stuff that slips her boots out from beneath her, the catastrophic hiss and crash of the distant horizon. “I don’t know if we should go forward.”

Carefully, she frees herself from Theon, leaving him standing on a finger of solid rock as Sansa adventures out onto the glassy darkness. It’s solid beneath her, but slippery, as if walking on ice. And, she realizes after a few moments, very warm.

She turns to share this disturbing revelation with Theon, ask if he might know what it means, but when she turns back to find him she feels her breath gust out all at once.

Theon is flickering.

Through his stomach, Sansa can see snatches of the crystal blue water they’d left behind; through his hands, tall grass and stone. His face has become nearly one with the sky, pale and colorless and almost gone. His name tears itself from her mouth, garbled, and in her rush to get back to him and _stop it_ she trips over her own skirts and very nearly falls headfirst into him.

He catches her. His arms are solid, his chest rising and warm, and she lets herself breathe.

“Oh,” he says faintly.

Her hands traverse his face and shoulders in a panic, reminding Sansa that he’s here. “You were fading,” she says. “You were disappearing from me.”

Theon’s blank eyes go wide. Gently, he lifts his hands to hers’ and pushes them down to rest at Sansa’s sides, where she clutches at her skirt. Then he lets her wrists go.

Almost immediately, he begins to fade, becoming more translucent in degrees for every moment Sansa watches him. She gasps, throws herself back at him, gets her hands about his waist, and there he is again—whole.

“I don’t—” She sighs, wanting nothing more than to curl up and sleep and pretend this is all a horrible dream, but she couldn’t even dream of letting him go now and the fire thunders away behind them. There is no going back.

Vaguely, she realizes someone is sniffling, and then she realizes it is herself.

“Sansa, don’t.” Hands on her arms, trailing up to her shoulders, and her stomach lurches with guilt that she can’t even look Theon in the eyes because she can’t stand the blankness. “Whatever this is, we’ll get past it, too. We’ve been through worse. You’ll just have to guide me.”

“I thought we didn’t have to worry anymore. That you were back.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” His hands drop to her waist. “This is it, Sansa. I can feel it. The last hurdle. We can go home.”

She thinks back to the Drowned God’s cavern, the Old Gods’ visions. Maybe it isn’t enough to save him from one, or two. Maybe she’d have to tear Theon from the claws of _all_ the gods before this is over. Even those she couldn’t name.

“Alright,” Sansa says, and laces her fingers with his.

“You’ll have to guide me.”

“Just follow in my steps.”

“I won’t let go.”

She squeezes his fingers and waits until he squeezes back before she starts forward.

-

The glass rock is hot, and so reflective that Sansa can see herself take each careful step across the plain, right down to the fear in her own face and the strange calmness in Theon’s. They start slow, Sansa distrustful of the entire place, but as the mountains ahead grow redder she speeds her steps. Only forward, only forward, and if that’s where they truly must go, she’d rather get there as soon as possible.

She goes, pulling Theon along behind her, as quickly as she can, until she hears a crack.

It’s a familiar sound—the same she’d heard in her childhood many times as the winters grew longer and longer. The cracking of ice underfoot as Arya ran across it, or Bran threw pebbles at it during their family prayers at the Godswood, or Theon shot arrow after arrow into it when it coated even the tree trunks. There’s no ice here, though, not in the warmth that is slowly becoming unbearable.

“Stop,” she says quietly, and Theon does, nearly falling and catching himself on her back.

“Is everything alright?”

“I don’t know.”

She glances up at the basin surrounding them, but the mountaintops remain still. Reluctantly, she looks down at their feet just as another crack rings out. The black glass is splitting open to reveal something _seething_. It is an angry red-orange, and it glows.

She breathes twice through her nose, sets her jaw, and says “we have to go.”

“Is everything alright,” Theon asks again, though it’s less a question than a statement he seems to already know the answer to and not want to hear.

“It will be if we go right now.” Sansa says it with enough confidence that she nearly makes herself believe it.

He opens his mouth as if to say something else, but then closes it again and pushes Sansa forward.

She suppresses the urge to run. It’s a loud voice in her head, but it’s drowned out only by the louder fear of letting go of Theon and being forced to watch as he evaporates into mist. Instead, she glides, trying to make her footsteps as light as possible, trying not to think about the noises of fracturing coming more and more frequently behind them now.

“It’s ice,” Theon says. “We are walking across ice on the river outside Winterfell. We are going into the woods with Robb and Arya, and they are on the other side, waiting for us.”

As he says it, she can nearly feel the cold wind biting at her cheeks.

He keeps talking, painting more and more details out of the hellish landscape: snow-laden trees, a wintry pale sun, Arya’s shouts ringing out through crisp air. Sansa doesn’t know if it’s the image or his voice that keeps her sane, but either way, it sets her in a calm trance: it is only her feet, and Theon’s hand, and the glossy rock, and nothing else matters.

Nothing, that is, until his words break off in a yelp of agony.

No sooner has she heard it than she is turning, reaching, gasping, and she sees his leg, the place where his breeches are eaten through to reveal raw pink skin beneath, the edges singed and smoking. The ground directly behind him has split open and is belching liquid danger to the sky.

She wishes she were strong enough to carry him all the way to the other side, and then all the way home, keep him in her arms until they pass through the gates of Winterfell once more. But all she can do is this, and so she asks through gritted teeth, “can you walk?”

Theon, face drawn, only nods.

Now they run. Now Sansa lets her feet fall indiscriminately, as long as they move forward. She clutches his fingers as tightly as she thinks he can bear, and her fist cramps up in agony, but she’d rather that a thousand times over than the alternative. She can hear Theon gasping behind her, his footfalls uneven—she’d forgotten, for a moment, that he doesn’t have his sight. Sansa forces herself to slow just in time for the ground in front of them to split open.

Behind them, when she looks back, is a sea of pulsating, angry red.

“Theon,” she gasps. “You’re going to need to trust me and do everything I say.”

He nods, never hesitating.

Sansa steps behind him, gets her arms about his chest, locks her feet inside the width of his boots. “Do you feel my legs?”

“I feel you.”

She nods, leans her forehead against his neck, breathes him in. “Alright. You need to move with me.”

With the molten rock bursting around them, the heat as thick as air, she moves. Theon moves one leg with her forward until they’re at the edge of their tiny island, and then falters just slightly when he feels it’s not there anymore.

“Trust me,” Sansa begs.

They lift their feet together and reach and land.

It’s slow—too slow, painfully slow—picking their way across the devastated plain that way, but it’s all they can do. Sansa can feel Theon trembling, whether from fear or exertion, she doesn’t know—but he doesn’t stop, and he doesn’t slump against her, and never does he once hang his head in the dejected way that used to symbolize Theon had left his own body to make room for Ramsay’s monster. He holds onto himself, and Sansa holds onto him, and thinks she’d rather be cursed to this place forever than let him go.

Then the air changes.

At first, she thinks it’s just shimmering with heat. But the farther they go—all the while, the looming mountains never seeming to come any closer—Sansa sees it _shift_ , the color of it becoming cooler, somehow, though she’d never much been conscious of air having a color before. In her peripheral vision, something darts away, she can swear it—but when she whips her head around, nothing is there.

When she turns back, the world has changed. Sansa’s beginning to think she should have expected it.

It’s different from all of the other times, though. Before, when she had crossed the country in steps, it had been immediate. There had been not so much as a trace of wherever she had left behind. Now, she can _see_ the islands of rock blend into desert sand, watch the red sky clash with arid, pale blue ahead.

The voices start, then, faint in the distance, and she makes up her mind.

“Just keep going,” she murmurs in Theon’s ear, her chin propped up on his shoulder as she watches their feet move forward in tandem. “We’ll be through it soon.”

“Do you hear that—”

“Yes. It’s nothing, Theon, just keep going.”

He relaxes into her, not putting his weight on her, just allowing himself to move alongside Sansa. She guides him across the last boiling gap, not realizing until their feet touch grainy sand on the other side that she’s been holding her breath.

Dry heat buffets her, a welcome change from the roar of the fire they’d left behind, and Sansa lets her hands fall to Theon’s waist, encircling him in a backwards embrace. A part of her can’t believe it. Somehow, she hadn’t expected it to be that easy.

“The voices,” Theon says, even as he leans back into her. “They’re still here.”

And yes, they are, a susurration of noise behind the wind, too many to pick out any individual alone. In a way, that’s better, because she doesn’t have to fear who she might hear; in other ways, it is much worse. They don’t even sound human to Sansa’s straining ears.

She understands, in a flash like lightning, that they won’t be safe again until they reach Winterfell. There will be no moments of peace to be had.

“We’re in the desert,” she tells Theon as they begin to walk again, letting him disentangle his body from hers now that their feet are back on solid ground. “There’s something in the distance…a city. Maybe water.”

She keeps on describing it, letting her voice wash over both of them, until Theon stops her.

“Essos.”

“What?”

“We’re in Essos. We have to be. I went to Mereen with Yara to treat with Daenerys. This is how it looked—how it felt.”

“It’s better than Valyria, at least,” she grumbles.

 _Essos. Valyria._ Worlds she never even dreamed she would see. The sand shifts underfoot, and from the corner of her eye, Sansa swears she catches movement again, but when she turns to it head-on there’s nothing to see. A land she doesn’t know, plagued by voices just out of reach, Theon blinded and growing paler every moment—how had it come to this? She had thought, after everything, she could have him.

The sun is fiery hot, and again she catches movement, closer now. Theon must feel her grip on him tighten, because he asks her with urgency in his voice “tell me what’s happening.”

“Nothing. It’s just the desert—”

The whispers crescendo into a whine. Theon bows his head, wincing, and at that moment a flurry of sand kicks up around them, obscuring all but the dark silhouettes racing toward them on all sides.

She screams, meaning to tell him to _go_ but unsure if the word even forms. Theon understands, though, and he goes, coughing and waving his arms about as if he can clear the air of drifting sand by sheer will alone. One hand flies to her dagger; she nearly brings the other to the bow at her back before remembering what is at stake and clamping it onto Theon’s upper arm in a vise grip.

“I can’t fight them,” he coughs out. “Sansa…”

“Run. I’ll be behind you.”

He does, feet slipping in the sand, and Sansa follows, her lungs burning, but she will not slow down. Her free hand slashes out with the dagger indiscriminately, and she catches her first real glimpses of the shadowy figures: dark, silent, wraithlike, almost shadows given form. One touches her forearm. Even through the sleeves of her dress, she can feel how cold the grip is. It’s as if her entire arm had been plunged into ice.

“I wish I could fight,” Theon pants.

Sansa does as well, but she doesn’t say it, only grits her teeth and clings to Theon as best she can.

The dust forms a tunnel around them, but as soon as they pass out of it, the desert opening up into a vast grassy plain, Sansa wishes it hadn’t. Now she can see them clearly, their gaunt, empty faces as they rush at Theon with seeking fingers. She can see their greed, their single-minded desperation.

 _You can’t have him_ , Sansa thinks.

With a renewed burst of energy, she dashes ahead of Theon, sliding her hand down his arm to fit into his palm as she pulls him along. He goes without complaint and allows her to lead him through as Sansa lashes out with the dagger at any of the creatures that dare come near Theon. She will not lose this, not him, _not him_ , the mantra doing more to keep her feet moving than anything else.

Grass becomes…something, burning beneath her feet and shifting; Sansa runs until she finds cobblestones instead and the dead faces meld into blank ones. They are grotesque; in each one, she swears she can see pieces of the people she had loved and hated. Robb’s sad eyes here, Margaery’s sweet smirk there, her mother’s neat red-grey braid pulled back severely against the rotting skin of a skull. Her stomach lurches. They will haunt her, she knows. She will never see them again and this will be her memory of her mother – a blank-faced skull laid over Cersei Lannister’s cruel body.

The ground drops away into mountainside. She does not let go, does not look back, just trusts that the hand she holds continues to belong there.

When the faces loom up in front of her, it comes almost as a sense of relief to Sansa. She has to stop running. She looks up. They’re back where they began, but the mountains are melting, the sky shimmering with more than heat.

Sansa does not belong here. She’d spent too long below, and now she’s not the only one paying for it.

They lash out with seeking fingers. As they do, their faces rearrange themselves, their bodies becoming amorphous. She recalls now, through the buzzing in her blood, Arya’s tale of Braavos: a god who granted you the ability to exchange your face for someone else’s. A vengeful god, one who demands sacrifice for each act.

She slashes out with her dagger, one-handed, and does not let go.

Theon has gone silent. She understands why, but this time, Sansa wishes he wouldn’t be. The idea that something else has taken his place behind her is too much to bear as she lunges forward, slashing one of the shadow creatures across the chest.

“Say something,” she calls, aware of how ragged her voice is. “Anything.”

Heavy breathing, and then his voice, hollow. “Sansa.”

She does what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do. She looks back.

He is fading. Sansa hadn’t realized she’d let go of him, but somewhere in the frenzy, her other hand had fallen to her needle and is clutching it at hip-height. That is what she’d mistaken Theon for—a lump of metal, cold in her hand. That is what she’d nearly lost him for.

With a cry, she rips the dagger across the creatures and throws herself back into his arms just as he becomes one with the fire behind him.

For an eternity inside a moment, Sansa can feel herself falling all the way, plunging into the bubbling red mass of primordia below them. For that eternity, she isn’t even frightened; if there is no Theon to catch her, if she’s lost him again for good this time, if this was all for nothing, then there is nothing left to do about it but fall.

Instead, she feels his arms solidify beneath her, growing and twining about her waist like vines.

“I thought—” she gasps, twists up and cranes her neck, grasps at his shoulders.

“I’m here,” he says. “I’m here, and I’m not leaving you. You’ll have to be a little more creative to be rid of me, I’m afraid.”

Sansa lets out a laugh that sounds more like a sob.

Belatedly, as she stands in the circle of Theon’s arms, she realizes the air around them has cooled again, no longer fiery against her flushed cheeks. She glances down. The ground is grey, featureless. Above them, so is the sky.

“An illusion,” Sansa mumbles, to which Theon makes a questioning sound.

“Everything is gone,” she clarifies. “This whole place—it’s as if it was never here.”

Theon shakes his head slowly, his curls brushing Sansa’s forehead with each pass. “I will never understand this place,” he mutters. “And I don’t think that I want to.”

She is inclined to agree. All she understands now is that they are free to leave.

Even as she thinks it, the world around them seems to tremble subtly. If she stares hard enough, Sansa imagines she can see the millions of little fragments that make up the visions: motes of heat and color and light swirling all about them, all mixing into the monotony. And if she reaches past them—

Her outstretched hand plunges into daylight.

“Theon,” she says, and bites her lip. “I think we’re going home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one was weird!! i know!! but for some reason i was fixated on the doom of valyria when i wrote it.   
> ch8 and half of ch9 are done so hopefully not as long a wait for the ending ❣


End file.
